How to profit from attack surface management

An “attack surface,” which represents the total number of potential points of attack in an environment, certainly isn’t a new concept.

For years, security teams have been working tirelessly to protect an ever-changing, ever-expanding perimeter—struggling to keep up with targeted attacks, shadow IT, and attacks on ephemeral cloud instances and forgotten infrastructure.

Maintaining an accurate picture of your infrastructure operating systems, services, software, and configurations is nearly impossible without specialized tools. And you can’t protect what you don’t know about.

Enter attack surface management (ASM).

ASM enables security practitioners to get an accurate, nearly real-time view of their environments and the overall health of their systems. These tools can detect and prioritize vulnerabilities. In addition, they can be extended with automation to remediate identified vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. With ASM tools, you can also generate reports detailing improvements over time and showing a reduction in the overall attack surface.

Understanding attack surface management

Most vulnerability-scanning software tools simply aren't up to the task of monitoring an organization’s entire digital footprint. As a company’s data grows—whether through acquisitions or company growth—they sometimes fail to update the very folks protecting the company.

Enable security teams and augment vulnerability assessment

ASM tools enable security teams to keep tabs on the entire organizational perimeter by combining various methods for scanning disparate issues across a massive internet presence.

But ASM should not be confused with vulnerability assessment, as these tools can identify a vast number of issues across a perimeter that is discovered organically, rather than cataloged.

How security teams benefit from ASM

While the value ASM brings to security teams may seem obvious, these solutions fit seamlessly into a larger defense-in-depth strategy. It goes beyond protecting endpoints, analyzing network traffic as it passes through firewalls or updating software and configurations on perimeter devices.

ASM provides an external perspective, examining your internet footprint much like an attacker sizing up your organization for a data breach or a ransomware attack, for example. It arms the folks who maintain the external safety of the company with data that can be analyzed, prioritized, and even shared with leaders to show the effectiveness of the security team—a notoriously hard metric to measure. It can show the ROI of your existing security toolset. Finally, it can be used to make informed decisions about where to focus efforts for the greatest impact.