Glossary

External Attack Surface Management

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External Attack Surface Management

Cloud, mobility, IoT, and remote workforces have expanded enterprise attack surfaces, potentially exposing enterprise assets to external threats. External Attack Surface Management (EASM) identifies and manages risks presented by Internet-facing digital resources and data assets. It is a discipline associated with the processes and technology needed to discover assets and effectively manage their vulnerabilities. Examples include exposed servers, credentials, public cloud service misconfigurations, dark web disclosures and third-party partner software code vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors. 

EASM also helps prioritize discovered vulnerabilities and risks, providing information about systems, cloud services and applications available and visible in the public domain to would-be attackers. Security and risk leaders utilize EASM to provide them with valuable risk context and actionable information. 

EASM delivers visibility through six primary capabilities:

1) Continuous monitoring for exposed assets (e.g., clouds, IPs, domains, certificates and IoT)

2) Asset discovery for external-facing assets and systems

3) Analysis to assess and prioritize the risks and vulnerabilities discovered

4) Remediation, mitigation, and incident response through prebuilt integrations with ticketing systems and SOAR tools

5) Support for digital business initiatives such as cloud adoption, remote working and IT/OT/IoT convergence

6) Understanding what organizations expose from an attacker’s point of view. 

Ridge Security EASM support: Implementing auto pentesting, red teaming, and EASM security measures as part of an integrated EASM program gives organizations greater visibility and control to overcome breaches, minimize risks, and increase security resilience. It acts like a human attacker, using sophisticated exploits to relentlessly locate exploits across an enterprise network, document its findings, and continuously measure results and effectiveness.