What Is Attack Surface Management (ASM)?
What’s inside?
Attack surface management (ASM) is the practice of identifying and addressing potential vulnerabilities and exposures in an organization’s digital attack surface. ASM is essential to enterprise security because the organization can only secure and protect assets that it knows exist and are vulnerable.
ASM identifies exposed assets across an organization’s entire IT environment, including networks, cloud services, users, and commonly overlooked assets, such as OT and IoT devices. By adopting ASM, an organization transitions to a proactive approach to security, finding and fixing security gaps before they can be exploited by an attacker.
Why Attack Surface Management Matters
Digital attack surfaces are expanding rapidly due to digital transformation initiatives. Cloud migration, SaaS growth, and remote work all introduce new vulnerabilities and security complexity. Additionally, unmanaged shadow IT can create hidden exposures that place the organization at risk without its knowledge.
Cybercriminals commonly look for easy targets, such as unpatched vulnerabilities, misconfigured cloud storage, and abandoned domains. ASM enables an organization to identify and close these gaps before an attacker can find them, reducing their likelihood of a breach. Additionally, a mature ASM program can also enhance regulatory compliance, especially for regulations that mandate continuous monitoring.
Core Capabilities of Attack Surface Management
ASM solutions support the entire exposure management process, from initial discovery of corporate assets through aiding remediation with actionable guidance and integration with security infrastructure. This full-cycle approach helps narrow the large volumes of potential vulnerabilities down to a set of real threats and is best implemented via an integrated platform.
Key Capabilities of ASM vs. Vulnerability Management
Asset Discovery
ASM offers comprehensive visibility into an organization’s digital attack surface, identifying both known and unknown assets. Web apps, APIs, IP ranges, cloud workloads, IoT/OT devices, and orphaned VPN gateways all fall within the scope of an ASM solution’s detection. With ongoing discovery, ASM solutions offer up-to-date visibility and eliminate blind spots.
Continuous Monitoring
Only performing scans and audits periodically means that the organization is working based on stale data and may miss new exposures, such as vulnerabilities introduced by an app update or new cloud resource. ASM performs continuous monitoring, offering real-time updates to exposure catalogs. With up-to-date data, it’s possible to close potential threats more rapidly, reducing the window when they could be exploited.
Risk Prioritization
ASM performs risk prioritization based on business impact, using context to identify real threats and accurately assess the risks that they pose to the business. This ensures that, for example, an issue with a production database is addressed before a misconfigured development server. Accurate prioritization enables IT teams to focus their resources where they have the greatest impact on an organization’s exposure to cyber risk.
Remediation Guidance
Based on its understanding of identified exposures and business environments, ASM solutions offer recommendations for remediating the issues. This actionable guidance reduces mean time to remediation (MTTR) by eliminating the need for security teams to develop and implement plans. Additionally, ASM, offered as part of an integrated platform, can take advantage of its knowledge of available security solutions — FWaaS, ZTNA, IPS, etc. — to provide more tailored remediation guidance.
Attack Surface Management in Practice
ASM provides continuous, comprehensive visibility into an organization’s attack surface, enabling IT teams to quickly address common blind spots across cloud, endpoints, and partners. By doing so, it helps to manage the risks associated with digital transformation by offering quick detection and fixes to common security problems.
Common Exposures That ASM Helps Identify
Cloud Environments
Cloud environments face various common security exposures, such as misconfigured storage buckets, forgotten workloads, and employees spinning up SaaS apps without IT oversight. ASM’s ability to detect both managed and unmanaged assets enables it to gain visibility into all of these assets, detect exposures, and offer practical guidance for IT teams to close cloud security gaps, decommission unused systems, and combat shadow IT.
Remote Users and Devices
Growing support for remote work and BYOD policies means that unmanaged devices are dramatically expanding an organization’s digital attack surface. Remote networks and personal devices may be improperly configured or secured, increasing their risk of malware, phishing, and similar threats. ASM monitors and accounts for distributed workforces, offering solutions to address the threats that they pose to the business.
Third-Party Integrations
All organizations have third-party risks and supply chain dependencies that lie outside of their control. Connected SaaS apps or APIs offer potential attack vectors for attackers who compromise third-party systems. ASM helps to identify these potential attacker entry points, offering the visibility required to effectively manage an organization’s third-party risk exposure.
How Cato Networks Enhances Attack Surface Management
Cato implements ASM capabilities as part of its integrated, single-pass infrastructure. With ASM, FWaaS, ZTNA, cloud-native controls, and other security functions as part of a unified platform, the Cato SASE Cloud Platform eliminates the need for multiple standalone controls and enables ASM to offer concrete, targeted remediation recommendations based on its knowledge of available security functions.
This integrated approach to ASM offers numerous benefits to the business, including simplified management, enhanced efficiency, reduced costs, and unified policy enforcement. Without the need to monitor, manage, and integrate various tools, IT teams can achieve higher operational savings and reduce the overhead associated with exposure management.
FAQ
What is the goal of attack surface management?
ASM reduces the number of entry points available to an attacker via continuous monitoring and comprehensive visibility into an organization’s attack surface. With up-to-date visibility into potential exposures, IT teams can proactively close these gaps before they are exploited, reducing security risk and enhancing operational efficiency. As IT environments grow more complex, including cloud, SaaS, and hybrid environments, ASM is essential to scale exposure and risk management across the enterprise.
How is ASM different from vulnerability management?
Vulnerability management involves periodic vulnerability scans, offering stale data about a subset of an organization’s risk exposures. ASM, on the other hand, is a continuous process of monitoring for all potential exposures across known and unknown assets. As a result, ASM allows organizations to proactively address a wide range of potential threats, while vulnerability management is inherently reactive and limited in scope.
Why is ASM important for cloud security?
Cloud environments expand an organization’s digital attack surface and introduce the challenges of ephemeral vulnerabilities as workloads are spun up and shut down rapidly. In cloud environments, misconfigurations are common, leaving the organization vulnerable to attack. ASM provides up-to-date visibility into misconfigurations and other exposures, enabling IT teams to efficiently address the issue, enhancing security and compliance with regulatory requirements.
What are examples of attack surface assets?
An organization’s digital attack surface includes all IT assets, including APIs, endpoints, SaaS apps, IP ranges, domains, cloud workloads, orphaned VPN gateways, dev/test servers, abandoned microsites, legacy applications, and IoT/OT devices. Often, these devices are public-facing or externally accessible, making them prime targets for attackers looking for potential entry points. ASM’s continuous discovery and monitoring help to identify overlooked assets in an organization’s attack surface and the potential vulnerabilities that they contain.
Does ASM replace other security tools?
No, ASM complements other security tools, providing visibility into security gaps that require remediation. Often, the remediation guidance provided by an ASM tool will recommend implementing additional controls via existing tools like ZTNA, FWaaS, SIEM, and SOAR, which, ideally, will be implemented as part of an integrated solution like the Cato SASE Cloud Platform. By mapping out an organization’s attack surface and providing insight into security gaps, ASM enhances the effectiveness of security tools and IT teams by drawing attention to the organization’s most dangerous security gaps.
Proactively Manage Your Digital Attack Surface with Cato’s SASE Cloud Platform
ASM enables organizations to proactively manage their digital attack surface by providing comprehensive visibility into IT assets and their related vulnerabilities and exposures. Since organizations can’t protect what they don’t know exists, ASM fills a critical role in a proactive security strategy.
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform integrates ASM capabilities alongside Security Service Edge (SSE) functions, unifying exposure identification and management in a single platform. This simplifies operations and eliminates the need to operate standalone solutions to fill critical security roles. Explore Cato’s SASE platform overview to see how ASM fits into unified security.