In cyber security, external attack surface management (ASM) is like tending a garden, helping you keep track of plants (your assets) as they grow. It enables you to monitor your assets and quickly identify risks to them—like pests attacking the plant or a plant needing water. The faster and more efficiently you can do this, the faster you can address vulnerabilities and exposures.
In the context of gardening, there’s no automated, highly efficient way of keeping track of what’s supposed to be growing. But in cyber security, you can take advantage of automated continuous attack surface management tools and cyber security telemetry solutions to monitor your attack surface in an easier, more scalable way. In fact, you need to automate attack surface management if you want to keep ahead of modern threats.
Beyond spreadsheets: Automating attack surface management
When it comes to external attack surface management, IT and network security teams face a tough battle – and traditional tooling doesn’t solve their challenges. Too often, they don’t discover unauthorized IT assets (or so-called shadow IT) which may be improperly secured and rife for attack.
This is due largely to ASM strategies that are fundamentally manual. In the past, IT departments kept track of what was supposed to exist within their IT estates using tools like spreadsheets. They’d manually create entries every time they added a server, PC or so on. Then, when they noticed something unusual, they’d check the spreadsheet to see if it involved any devices or hosts they didn’t know about.
There were, of course, ways to automate ASM to some extent. For example, IT teams periodically ran scans to discover previously unknown hosts on the network. This helped them in some cases to identify devices that aren’t properly secured or that lack access control policies aligned with organizational requirements. But because the automated discovery wasn’t happening continuously and in real time, it could take days, weeks or months to find insecure resources.
In fact, according to the 2024 Gartner Innovation Insight: Attack Surface Management report, “[o]nly 17% of organizations can clearly identify and inventory a majority (95% or more) of their assets.”
In IT environments that are highly dynamic – with users are spinning cloud resources up and down on a frequent basis, or adding new domains for product launches to the enterprise network – periodic attack surface management isn’t enough. You need complete automation and truly continuous, real-time discovery.
As Dark Reading notes, “Companies use hundreds of SaaS and cloud apps, many introduced without official approval, complicating security oversight.” Automated, real-time asset discovery helps to mitigate this risk.
https://engage.checkpoint.com/2025-gigaom-attack-surface-management-radar
The pitfalls of manual ASM
The problems with a manual approach to ASM are many.
For starters, there’s the issue of wasted time. Manually tracking devices distracts IT engineers from other tasks that drive greater value, like updating software. In a world where many IT teams are already stretched thin, the last thing they should be wasting their time on is manual attack surface management.
Another key issue is that manual ASM, as we mentioned, simply doesn’t suffice in a highly dynamic IT landscape. It might have worked well enough in the days when everything ran on-prem and the lead time for setting up new servers was weeks or months. Today, however, users can register a domain in seconds with the click of a button, or create a new AWS EC2 instance overnight. These capabilities have made IT estates very dynamic, and ASM strategies need to evolve to keep pace.
On top of this, manual ASM often leaves IT teams with blind spots. Even with periodic automated scanning, they may miss shadow IPs and other assets that don’t happen to be turned on when the scan runs, or that are hidden on private networks or subnets that the tools don’t scan.
The power of automated external attack surface management
Automated external attack surface management mitigates these risks. With continuous ASM, teams can collect cyber security telemetry data from across their IT estates on an ongoing basis – so that whenever something new appears, they’ll know about it instantly.
As a result, continuous ASM delivers benefits such as:
- Real-time asset inventory: ASM platforms that discover assets continuously provide a real-time, up-to-the-minute view of your entire IT estate. You’ll know right away when assets are added, removed or modified without having to waste time searching for them manually.
- Comprehensive visibility: Continuous ASM solutions like Check Point Infinity External Risk Management support a wide range of asset types. They can discover not just traditional assets like web servers, but also domains, subdomains, social media profiles and any other assets linked to your company or brand. They also provide visibility that goes far beyond simple asset discovery; they can assess technologies in use, configuration settings, and more.
- Shadow IT detection: By continuously monitoring network traffic and user activity, ASM platforms can identify and flag shadow IT deployments, including those that are missing from asset inventories or intermittently connected. This means you can bring these rogue elements under management and control. This is crucial for mitigating the risks associated with unauthorized software and services.
- Streamlined IT operations: Automated ASM frees up IT teams to focus on other, more strategic tasks, like security hardening.
- Context: Continuous ASM provides not just an inventory of what exists in your IT estate, but also the context necessary to know how to react when you discover a potential risk. It tells you, for example, who owns a shadow asset, so that you can approach them to remedy the situation.
Asset discovery as the tip of the iceberg
Continuously discovering assets within your IT estate is just the first step toward a robust security posture. Equally important is understanding which risks stem from your assets and what you should do about them.
This is where real-time vulnerability detection and validation comes in. ASM platforms that include these capabilities in addition to asset discovery allow you to:
- Identify vulnerabilities continuously: Continuous ASM solutions assess assets in real time to detect known vulnerabilities on them based not just on basic service version detection, but full analysis of the programming languages installed (e.g. PHP), the third-party software running (e.g. WordPress and various plug-ins) and other security issues with your organization’s applications (e.g. SQL injection vulnerabilities).
- Prioritization and risk scoring: When vulnerabilities appear, you need to know which ones pose the greatest risk. ASM platforms like Check Point Infinity External Risk Management can prioritize vulnerabilities based on severity level, exploitability and potential impact. In turn, IT teams can determine which issues to address first to maximize the effectiveness of their time and resources.
- Categorized alerts: To streamline incident response further, ASM solutions can categorize alerts based on risk type, making it easier for analysts to determine how to respond to each alert.
- Integrated threat intelligence: Threat intelligence and ASM go hand-in-hand – which is why ASM solutions should integrate threat intelligence into asset discovery and risk detection by, for example, providing guidance on which CVEs threat actors are most likely to exploit in a given industry or region. This context further hones the accuracy of risk prioritization. As a Forbes article puts it, “Threat intelligence is crucial in a layered approach to ASM.”
- Supply chain visibility: The most effective continuous attack surface management tools can track risks associated with vendors and suppliers, in addition to those that exist within your IT estate directly. The faster you find risks in your supply chain, the more effectively you can reduce your overall risk profile.
- Exposure validation: Using active exposure validation, ASM platforms can validate the exploitability of vulnerabilities, showing that they are not merely theoretical issues but major risks. This is another way to reduce the burden placed on IT teams and help them focus on tasks that yield the highest value – as opposed to chasing alerts that turn out to be non-issues.
Better Together: External Attack Surface Management and Vulnerability Management
“Attack surface management isn’t just an IT concern; it’s a digital business risk challenge for your entire organization,” as Forbes notes. Discovering risky IT assets in real time is one critical step toward minimizing risk in complex, highly dynamic IT estates. To respond effectively to risks, IT organizations also need integrated vulnerability detection and threat intelligence capabilities, which allow them to determine where the greatest risks lie and how they should respond.
This is why Check Point External Risk Management offers a fully automated, continuous and integrated approach to ASM, vulnerability detection and threat intelligence. Learn more about what sets our solution apart by requesting a demo.