Enhancing Cyber Resilience: A Strategic Approach to Attack Surface Management in Modern IT Environments

Highlights:

• A modern attack surface management solution reviews and analyzes assets 24/7 to prevent new vulnerabilities, detect security gaps, and resolve misconfigurations and other risks.
• EASM solutions monitor network attack surfaces, continuously discovering and assessing internet-facing assets like web servers, APIs, SSL certificates, and cloud services.

The transition to the cloud, SaaS applications’ growth, and the rising remote working have expanded and tangled many organizations’ attack surfaces, making them troublesome to define and protect. As nearly any asset can serve as a cyberattack entry point, organizations must enhance visibility across all assets—whether known or unknown, on-premises or in the cloud, internal or external.

Attack surface management involves the ongoing discovery, monitoring, evaluation, prioritization, and remediation of attack vectors within an organization’s IT infrastructure. Unlike traditional asset discovery or management, ASM focuses on threat detection and vulnerability management from the attacker’s perspective, encouraging organizations to identify and assess risks from known and unknown assets, including rogue components.

What is an Attack Surface?  

The attack surface houses all the potential entry points where an attacker might try to access business systems and data. These points include the following:

• Websites

All websites managed by the company, encompassing public, internal, and e-commerce platforms.

• Networks

All networks utilized by the company to connect its devices and systems, including the internet, private networks, and cloud-based networks.

• Applications

Any software application accessible externally, including web applications, mobile apps, and APIs.

• Devices

Any device connected to the company’s networks, such as laptops, smartphones, servers, and IoT devices.

• Cloud infrastructure

Any cloud infrastructure utilized by the company, including public, private, and hybrid clouds.

Organizations’ attack surface is continually growing due to factors like cloud adoption and the rising number of connected devices. This makes it increasingly challenging for organizations to monitor all vulnerabilities and implement effective mitigation strategies.

Core Functions of Attack Surface Management

ASM functionalities encompass a range of proactive measures designed to continuously identify, assess, and mitigate vulnerabilities across an organization’s digital landscape.

• Discovery

Companies spot and map all digital assets across internal and external attack surfaces in the commencing phase. Unlike legacy solutions, modern attack surface management tools mimic threat actors, enhancing visibility and ensuring all potential attack vectors are accounted for.

• Testing

The attack surface constantly shifts with new device integration, user addition, and business evolvement. Therefore, the tool must perform ongoing monitoring and testing. A modern attack surface management solution reviews and scrutinizes assets 24/7 to prevent unknown vulnerabilities, detect security voids, and solve misconfigurations and other challenges.

• Context

Not all IT assets hold equal risk as potential attack vectors. Advanced attack surface management solutions analyze exposed assets, providing context like usage, ownership, IP address, and network connections to assess the severity of cyber risks.

• Prioritization

Attack surface management tool identifies and maps IT assets, helping organizations prioritize vulnerability remediation. It offers risk scores based on exploitability, visibility, and complexity. Unlike traditional methods like penetration testing or red teaming, these scores are objective and calculated using preset criteria and data.

• Remediation

With the automated processes in the first five phases of the attack surface management program, IT staff are now equipped to identify the most critical risks and prioritize remediation. As these efforts are typically driven by IT teams rather than cybersecurity professionals, it’s crucial to ensure information is shared across functions and that all team members are aligned on security operations.

Understanding various ASM functionalities is crucial as it lays the groundwork for exploring the types of ASM solutions tailored to meet specific organizational needs.

Types of Cyber Attack Surface Management

Various specialized categories concentrate on specific asset types and their corresponding attack surfaces within attack surface management. These solutions offer continuous monitoring, identify internal assets and their configurations, evaluate security controls, and ensure compliance with security strategies.

• External attack surface management (EASM)

EASM solutions monitor network attack surfaces, continuously discovering and assessing internet-facing assets like web servers, APIs, SSL certificates, and cloud services. They track changes, analyze vulnerabilities, and provide real-time insights, detecting exposures such as misconfigurations, leaked credentials, and third-party software risks.

• Internal attack surface management (IASM)

This attack surface management solution targets risks within an organization’s internal network, addressing issues like unauthorized access, privilege misuse, and service disruptions. IASM focuses on minimizing threats from within the organization.

• Cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM)

CAASM focuses on complete visibility of both internal and external asset inventories. It combines IASM and EASM to offer a holistic view of an organization’s digital footprint, including endpoints, servers, devices, and applications. Data is garnered from IT management, asset discovery, vulnerability tools, and endpoint security.

• Open-source attack surface management (OSASM)

This specialized area focuses on the increasing concern of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) regarding risks tied to open-source components, such as maintenance, licensing, and dependencies. These tools help identify exposed assets, detect vulnerabilities, and monitor changes that may heighten risk in solutions utilizing open-source components.

Organizations strictly consider adopting ASM to enhance security resilience and proactively defend against potential vulnerabilities.

Why Businesses are Turning to Attack Surface Management Platforms

Increased cloud adoption, digital transformation, and the rise of remote work have significantly broadened companies’ digital footprints and attack surfaces, introducing new assets that connect daily. Traditional asset discovery and vulnerability management processes, designed for more stable networks, struggle to keep pace with the rapid emergence of new vulnerabilities. For example, penetration testing can identify known vulnerabilities but cannot uncover new risks that arise daily.

ASM offers a continuous workflow and hacker’s perspective, enabling security teams and SOCs to adopt a proactive security posture against a constantly evolving attack surface. ASM solutions provide real-time visibility into emerging vulnerabilities and attack vectors.

These solutions can leverage data from traditional risk assessment tools for deeper context in analyzing vulnerabilities. They can integrate with threat detection technologies—such as SIEM, EDR, or XDR—to enhance threat mitigation and accelerate response across the enterprise.

In a Nutshell

Attack surface management and protection is essential in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, where organizations face an ever-expanding array of vulnerabilities and threats. By providing continuous visibility and insights into both internal and external assets, ASM empowers security teams to identify and mitigate risks before they can be exploited proactively. As businesses embrace digital transformation and remote work, adopting a robust ASM strategy will be crucial for maintaining a strong security posture and safeguarding sensitive information against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

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