What is External Attack Surface Management

Read our blog post to learn about external attack surface management, and why it is critical for a robust cybersecurity strategy.

External Attack Surface Management: A Critical Component of Cybersecurity

Breaches involving exploited vulnerabilities have surged by 180% in the past year, according to Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR).¹ In today's digital landscape, an organization's attack surface encompasses its entire network, both on premises and off, along with all potential vulnerable points where attackers could gain entry. This is why it is crucial for SOC teams to continuously monitor their organization's attack surface.

External attack surface management (EASM) involves the process of discovering, assessing, and addressing vulnerabilities and risks linked to an organization's external-facing digital assets, including websites, applications, and network infrastructure. This process requires continuous monitoring and safeguarding of the exposed attack surface to thwart breaches and unauthorized access by malicious actors. EASM allows organizations to maintain visibility into their network, patch vulnerabilities, and defend against possible threats.

An organization's external attack surface is constantly expanding and evolving. Cloud resources, unmanaged assets and code repositories - all internet-facing assets have the potential to be exploited if there is an unmitigated vulnerability, misconfiguration or exposure. This is where threat intelligence plays a crucial role. It helps security teams prioritize what needs attention first and why, ensuring that the most critical vulnerabilities are addressed promptly.

By integrating EASM into their cybersecurity strategy, CISOs and security leaders can better understand their exposure, reduce risks and enhance their overall security posture. This proactive approach is essential in defending against the sophisticated and persistent threats that characterize the modern cyber threat landscape.

Top Cyber Threats

Organizations today face a myriad of ever-increasing risks and threats that can compromise their security and operational integrity. Here are some of the most common ones:

• Exposure: Exposure refers to the state of being open to attack or damage. This can include anything from publicly accessible servers to exposed APIs. When sensitive data or systems are exposed, they become easy targets for attackers looking to exploit any weaknesses.
• Misconfiguration: Misconfigurations are one of the most prevalent security issues. They occur when systems, applications or devices are not set up or configured correctly, leaving them vulnerable to attacks. A notable example is the recent Snowflake data breach, where a misconfiguration in the cloud data platform led to what was possibly the largest exposure of sensitive data in 2024. The 165 organizations that reportedly were hacked, including very large and prominent organizations, failed to fully implement multi-factor authentication, had outdated and unrotated credentials, and had other risk factors that allowed malware to exploit their systems.
• Vulnerabilities: Vulnerabilities are weaknesses in software or hardware that can be exploited by attackers. Among these, zero-day vulnerabilities are particularly dangerous. These are vulnerabilities that are often exploited by attackers within hours of their discovery, before the vendor has had a chance to issue a patch. The rapid exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities underscores the importance of quickly patching systems to mitigate potential damage.

By understanding and addressing these common risks and threats, organizations can better protect themselves against potential security breaches and maintain a robust security posture.

The External Attack Surface Management Process

Security teams should adhere to the following steps in the external attack surface management process to discover assets, test for vulnerabilities, prioritize risks and perform remediation.

1. Discover Assets

Effective asset management begins with knowing what assets you have. An organization's assets may include outdated IPs and credentials, shadow IT, cloud environments and IoT devices, among others, which can easily be overlooked by traditional cybersecurity tools. Advanced EASM solutions leverage reconnaissance techniques similar o those used by attackers to quickly identify and catalog these vulnerable assets, in order to achieve comprehensive visibility and security.

2. Add Context

Incorporating business context and ownership is essential for effective attack surface management. Legacy asset discovery tools often lack consistent contextual information, making it challenging to prioritize remediation efforts, while advanced EASM solutions can enrich assets with detailed information. This comprehensive contextualization allows security teams to prioritize risks effectively and decide whether to remove, patch or monitor exposed assets.

3. Prioritize

Given the vast number of potential attack vectors, it's often impractical to verify and fix every single one across all assets. For this reason, it is crucial for security teams to leverage contextual information to prioritize and focus their efforts. Criteria such as exploitability, detectability, attacker priority, and remediation efforts can be used to identify and address the most critical tasks first. This ensures that the most high-risk vulnerabilities are prioritized and reduces alert fatigue.

4. Test Continuously

A one-time test of the attack surface is insufficient, as attack surfaces are constantly evolving with the addition of new devices, user accounts, workloads and services. Each new element introduces potential risks, such as misconfigurations, known vulnerabilities, zero-day vulnerabilities and sensitive data exposure. Therefore, security teams must continuously test all possible attack vectors against the entire attack surface, while referencing the most current version of the organization's attack surface. This ongoing vigilance ensures that emerging threats are promptly identified and mitigated.

5. Mitigate

After mapping and contextualizing the attack surface, the mitigation process can begin. Organizations can remediate vulnerabilities, which are prioritized based on identified risks, through various means, including automated tools, security operations teams, IT operations teams and development teams. Mitigation strategies may include:

• Hardening: Following configuration best practices and strengthening security controls (e.g., applying patches, configuring firewalls, etc.)
• Reducing exposure: Limiting unnecessary access points, e.g. open ports
• Monitoring: Continuously tracking changes to the attack surface
• Education: Training employees to recognize and report security issues

Leveraging LUMINAR for External Attack Surface Management

Many point solutions exist in the market, which are built with narrow capabilities that only address EASM. As a holistic threat intelligence solution, LUMINAR offers a broader and more comprehensive defense, supporting a wide range of needs beyond EASM, including CTI (cyber threat intelligence) and DRP (digital risk protection). This holistic approach offers a more robust, proactive and informed external attack surface management solution.

LUMINAR provides:

• Risk scoring capabilities to help organizations prioritize vulnerabilities based on their potential impact, ensuring that the most critical issues are addressed first
• Early warning notifications to ensure that security teams are aware of security issues in real time, and are able to address them promptly
• Identification ofvulnerable ports providing detailed reasoning and alerts to help security teams take swift action
• Vulnerability intelligence, which enhances patching and mitigation efforts and maintains high awareness of potential threats, including dark web exploitation attempts, and others

LUMINAR Attack Surface Management (ASM) Module in Action

1. Security teams receive comprehensive and actionable insights about exposed assets, including:

• External attack surface visibility overview of stolen access credentials traded on dark web marketplaces and crucial information on organization-related exposed servers
• Auto-mapping and discovery capabilitiesto effectively navigate exposed assets
• Threat level and risk scores assigned automatically based on the severity of the risk associated with each asset, providing security teams with a critical advantage in prioritizing patching and mitigation efforts

Exposed assets are displayed along with widgets

Detailed view of exposed assets, including threat levels and customizable columns with specific asset information

2. Analysts can access in-depth and detailed information for specific assets, including:

• Hostname, organization and domains for exposed servers
• Details and potential vulnerabilities for open ports
• Explanations of the risk scoring for each asset with a summary of potential vulnerabilities
• Log history detailing the history of the maintenance of each asset

Detailed view showing an exposed server

3. Security teams can enrich their external attack surface management with threat intelligence, leveraging information about potential vulnerability exploitation in order to mitigate threats

Vulnerability intelligence module

Click here to meet with a LUMINAR threat intelligence expert

Sources:

1. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/2024-data-breach-investigations-report-emea

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