Attack Surface Management – a Buying Guide

To facilitate the triage process and risk prioritization, business context can also be added (e.g. relationships between individual assets). This helps focus on key network risks. CyCognito’s tool also tracks configuration changes, making it possible to quickly identify new risks to the company’s infrastructure.

JupiterOne Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management

JupiterOne touts its CAASM solution as a way to “seamlessly aggregate cyber asset data into a unified view.” Context is automatically added as needed, and relationships between assets can be defined and optimized to improve vulnerability analysis and incident response capabilities.

Custom queries allow cybersecurity teams to answer complex questions while browsing the asset inventory via an interactive map. You can integrate the security tools you have already invested in – allowing for a holistic, centralized perspective on the security level.

Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management

Microsoft Defender EASM detects unmanaged assets and resources deployed via shadow IT or located on other cloud platforms. Once the assets and resources are identified, the tool looks for vulnerabilities at every level of the technology stack, including the underlying platform, app frameworks, web applications, components and core code.

Defender EASM enables IT professionals to quickly remediate vulnerabilities in newly discovered assets by categorizing and prioritizing them in real time upon discovery. Naturally, Defender EASM can be tightly integrated with other Microsoft solutions such as Security Copilot.

Outpost24 EASM

The Swedish provider Outpost24 acquired the Belgian EASM provider Sweepatic in 2023 and integrated its tool into its module collection for threat intelligence, data leakage and pentesting. This EASM solution is available both standalone and as a managed service and can collect data either passively via DNS and other TCP/IP details or via direct connections to cloud providers such as AWS and Azure as well as the solutions of major software providers (such as ServiceNow, Slack or Atlassian).

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse

Xpanse is part of Palo Alto’s XSIAM product suite, but can also be purchased separately. However, the standalone product has a slightly smaller range of functions.

The Palo Alto tool also supports integration with third-party tools such as Qualys, Jira, and ServiceNow. The product also has an impressive selection of ready-made detection rules, widgets for creating queries and discovery routines and setting up customizable data dashboards.

Rapid7 Surface Command

Surface Command is just one of numerous modules that Rapid7 offers (including vulnerability and incident management as well as cloud native security). The tool brings together threat exposure, detection and response and promises a continuous “bird’s eye view” of all vulnerabilities – from the endpoint to the cloud.

The Rapid 7 tool is designed to identify blind spots in security and accelerate response and resolution. For the latter, agent-based AI functions are also included.

Risk Profiler EASM

All external threats can be managed via the RiskProfiler platform. For example, the tool enables dark web monitoring, digital monitoring as well as hacking campaigns, vulnerabilities and supply chain attacks to be tracked. The threat information obtained from this is condensed into a uniform corpus by AI agents.

The tool also includes more than 13,000 pre-installed rules that combine both open source and our own proprietary algorithms. Third-party risk assessments are also analyzed. A customizable management dashboard visualizes the data in various views.

SOCRadar AttackMapper

With AttackMapper (part of the tool suite for SOC teams), SOCRadar wants to give users the attackers’ view of the assets. The tool dynamically monitors assets in real time using Agentic AI, identifying new or changed ones and analyzing them for potential vulnerabilities.

The results are correlated with known attack methods to support the decision-making and triage process. AttackMapper not only monitors endpoints and software vulnerabilities, but also SSL vulnerabilities, expired certificates, DNS entries and configurations. The tool itself detects website defacement attacks, which can be crucial to protecting brand reputation.

Tenable Attack Surface Management

Tenable has been offering tools to detect vulnerabilities for several years – and the current tool suite also meets modern IT security requirements. Tenable Attack Surface Management is the company’s EASM module integrated into its One exposure management platform.

Tenable Attack Surface Management provides context and details about assets and vulnerabilities, not only from a technical perspective, but also at a business level, which is necessary for comprehensive response prioritization.

7 questions before investing in ASM

Here are some questions you should ask yourself and potential attack surface management solution providers before signing a contract.

Does our company need an EASM or a CAASM solution? The answer to this depends on whether you are looking for internal or external attackers – and how large a proportion of your on-premises infrastructure is.
How comprehensive – and effective – is the tool automated? Does it reliably detect all vulnerable resources, including digital certificates, exposed credentials, and servers and services connected to the network? What metadata and other details does the solution provide?
How does the solution fix vulnerabilities if it finds them? Is this automated or is manual intervention required?
Does the tool support continuous monitoring? And if so, how are changes tracked?
Which vulnerabilities are shared or integrated with other SOC tools?
Are there different dashboards for management and other purposes? Or: How can the tool be adapted to different user groups?
What does your pricing look like in detail? Make sure you really understand the pricing structure of the provider you choose. In most cases, you are confronted with complex, usage-dependent billing models.