In today’s complex threat environment, the challenge for security professionals isn’t just defeating threats – it’s finding your vulnerabilities in the first place. That’s where External Attack Surface Management (EASM) tools come in.

EASM can identify the many weaknesses that attackers use to target your organisation. Effective solutions provide crucial information on the vulnerabilities of organisational assets and cloud services that are visible in the public domain.
In practice, EASM can refer to a range of processes, technology and professional services, but they all have one thing in common: they’re used “to discover internet-facing assets and systems and exposures that could be targeted by malicious threat actors”, as Gartner notes.

As with any security-focused technology, it’s important to understand how EASM fits into a modern security stack. EASM shouldn’t replace your existing architecture; instead, an effective system will complement your capabilities and deliver new insights and intelligence.

Expanding Dangers

The attack surface for modern organisations is expansive, ranging from hardware to software and networks – and even people. In the past, the focus was on assets like network devices and on-premises servers. However, this has expanded with the growth of cloud services, mobile devices, the Internet of Things, and even remote working practices, as KuppingerCole Analysts has noted:

“This expansion introduces new endpoints and potential vulnerabilities and makes organisations more susceptible to cyber threats.”

How do EASM tools help organisations come to grip with this rapidly growing threat environment? While specific solutions can vary, an effective EASM tool is typically founded on three key features:

1 - Continuous discovery: EASM is designed to automate the discovery of your external assets – and thus your vulnerabilities. This could include DNS records, email systems, and applications like websites and file shares, among other assets.

2 - Automated security analysis: Based on the discoveries made in the first phase, this second phase introduces additional verifications to determine potential security issues, such as software vulnerabilities, error codes and unencrypted login pages.

3 - Risk-based reporting: It’s vital to prioritise the issues identified right from the outset. With solutions like Outpost24 EASM, users receive action plans on mitigating prioritised threats.

EASM Advantages

By integrating EASM into your processes at the earliest stage possible, you give your security operations center (SOC) full visibility of the attack surface. You can cut back on blind spots, enable proactive blocking or remediation, and streamline the incident response. Let’s look at some key advantages:

Continuous monitoring: Cutting-edge EASM is a first line tool that runs continuously, detecting newly exposed assets before they ever reach vulnerability scanners, firewalls or alert thresholds.

Enriched threat intelligence: EASM data can be used to enrich data feeds and inform Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) processes. This improves your ability to detect adversarial reconnaissance efforts or early stage attacks, delivering a crucial advantage.

Enhanced Digital Risk Protection (DRP): With effective EASM, you can identify exposed assets (such as leaked credentials). This information can be fed into broader DRP programs to detect such threats as brand impersonation or phishing campaigns.

A Complementary Capability

EASM isn’t a replacement for existing security architecture: rather, it should enable and enhance your processes.

EASM focuses specifically on what attackers see externally, including any assets spun up outside formal change processes. This means it fills any gaps left behind by your own, internally focused systems.

Take modern pen tests, for instance, which rely on accurate, real-time asset maps. EASM provides insights into new assets and ensures they are tracked, meaning red team engagements and similar efforts can utilise accurate information.

Likewise, an effective EASM system will be designed to work hand-in-glove with your existing vulnerability scanners. While a vulnerability scanner will search for software vulnerabilities and known assets, EASM scanners discover both known and unknown assets, using DNS information rather than IP addresses.

Importantly, it will also work closely with your current cloud security posture management (CSPM) solution, rather than functioning as a replacement. While CSPM focuses on configuration compliance within known cloud resources, EASM discovers unknown or forgotten cloud-hosted endpoints. In other words, CSMP and EASM are complementary.

Actionable Results

Overall, you want simple, effective radiation actions to close any security gaps. Outpost24’s EASM service aims to deliver just this capability. Outpost24’s EASM solution is a cloud-based platform that maps your growing attack surface with automatic data gathering, enrichment and AI-driven analysis modules. Our system analyses all your organisation’s known and unknown internet-facing assets for attack paths and vulnerabilities.

The system automatically prioritises and reports on security issues, including misconfigurations in email/DNS/web, weak encryption, vulnerabilities and much more besides. Key features include:

• 24/7 monitoring

• Comprehensive discovery

• An interactive dashboard

• Custom alerts and reporting

• Improved workflow

EASM from Outpost24 enables your organisation to deliver actionable results, with accurate risk scoring highlighting risks for mitigation and delivering effective prioritisation.

In an increasingly dangerous and complex external threat environment, technology can help organisations monitor threats across the board, including those you never knew existed. EASM is no longer a nice to have – it’s essential. Interested to see how it works? Book an attack surface analysis today.

Brought to you by 

Marcus White Outpost24

Marcus is an Outpost24 cybersecurity specialist based in the UK, with 8+ years experience in the tech and cyber sectors. He writes about attack surface management, application security, threat intelligence, and compliance.