What is attack surface management (ASM)?

Attack Surface Management (ASM) is a proactive cybersecurity approach that continuously monitors and mitigates all security risks across a company’s cloud assets. Its goal is attack surface reduction, minimizing the potential entry points attackers could use to breach your network perimeter.

In practice, ASM secures everything your company uses—both inside your office and online—that a cybercriminal could discover and exploit. By proactively identifying, analyzing, and remediating these exposure areas, businesses can fortify their cyber defenses against data breaches, malware infections, and other threats targeting their cloud infrastructure and sensitive data stores.

Key takeaways

• Attack Surface Management (ASM) identifies, classifies, prioritizes, and monitors all potential entry points for cyberattacks on an organization's digital assets.
• Core Attack Surface Management functions are asset identification, risk classification, prioritization of vulnerabilities, and continuous monitoring.
• Attack Surface Management implementation involves vulnerability analysis, evaluating providers, and establishing policies after deployment.
• Vulnerability management identifies, analyzes, and resolves security risks across networks and devices.
• Organizations can mitigate attack surface risks through Zero Trust policies, secure remote access, strong authentication, and protective backups.

What is an attack surface?

An organization's attack surface refers to the total sum of vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and potential entry points that threat actors could exploit to gain unauthorized access to systems or data. The larger the cyber attack surface, the more exposed assets there are, the higher the risk of a successful breach.

Attack Surface Management focuses on identifying and reducing these exposure points.

Key components of an attack surface

The entire attack surface is made up of several core components:

Known assets

These are the IT assets, like devices, applications, and infrastructure, that an organization's security teams are aware of and have intentionally provisioned on the network. Known assets undergo regular monitoring and security posture assessments.

Unknown assets

In contrast, unknown assets are unidentified devices, shadow IT systems, or unauthorized applications operating on the network without the security team's knowledge. These rogue elements significantly increase risk as they lack proper security controls.

Rogue assets

While also unauthorized, rogue assets refer specifically to known assets that have been hijacked or compromised to conduct malicious activities, such as deploying ransomware. Detecting these can be challenging.

Vendor connections

Beyond just internal assets, an organization's vendors and third-party integrations expand the external attack surface. Cloud providers, SaaS tools, contractors, and partners may introduce new vulnerabilities to monitor and secure.

Organizations can methodically reduce their overall cyber risk exposure over time by continuous asset discovery and evaluating all these components that make up the externally exposed digital attack surface.

Different types of attack surfaces

An organization's attack surface isn't just its networks and software. It also includes physical assets and the people within the company. Understanding the different types of attack surfaces is crucial, as each presents its own risks and requires its own strategies for assessment and mitigation.

Physical attack surface

An enterprise’s physical attack surface includes all of its hardware, such as computers, mobile devices, external storage drives, laptops, and IoT machinery. This surface can be exploited through various means, including insider attacks, stolen equipment, improper disposal of old hardware, and negligence by remote teams.

Digital attack surface

Due to the widespread adoption of cloud computing technologies, the digital attack surface presents more complex risks. It includes misconfigurations, poor identity access management (IAM), publicly exposed resources, and unofficially commissioned resources, also known as shadow IT.

Social engineering attack surface

The social engineering attack surface refers to an organization's human element, including individuals' vulnerability to manipulation and deception. Unlike technical exploits, social engineering attacks target human emotions, cognitive biases, and a lack of awareness to trick users into compromising security.

Examples of Attack Surface Management

An organization's attack surface consists of all the assets exposed to potential cyber threats, including on-premises systems, cloud assets, internet-facing assets, and mobile devices. As an organization undergoes digital transformation, its attack surface grows and changes, introducing new attack vectors and cyber risks.

To better understand the concept of attack surfaces, let's look at some concrete examples of the latter and how malicious actors can exploit them:

• Web applications: Web applications are a common attack vector, as they are often exposed to the public internet and can contain vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data
• Cloud environments: Cloud environments introduce new cyber risks, such as misconfigured security settings, insecure APIs, and shared resources—attackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to gain access to sensitive data or launch attacks on other cloud tenants
• Third-party risks: Third-party vendors and partners can introduce new vulnerabilities to an organization's network; for example, a vendor's compromised system could provide attackers with a foothold in the organization's network
• Remote access: Remote access solutions, such as VPNs and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), can be targeted by attackers to gain access to a company's network
• IoT devices: Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as security cameras and smart thermostats, can be vulnerable to attacks and provide attackers with a foothold in the organization's network

Why is Attack Surface Management important?

Attack surface management is crucial because it helps organizations gain visibility and control over an increasingly complex IT ecosystem with many potential entry points for attackers. The organization's attack surface expands rapidly as businesses adopt cloud services and remote work solutions and integrate with more third parties.

Unpatched vulnerabilities in any of these exposed areas can lead to crippling data breaches. Comprehensive attack surface monitoring and mitigation allow teams to stay ahead of emerging threats by continuously identifying and resolving security weaknesses and gaps before they are exploited.

Components of Attack Surface Management

Given the broad exposure area we have just covered, Attack Surface Management requires a strategic, continuous process to identify and mitigate risks properly.

The core components of a practical attack surface management program consist of:

1. Identification. One of the foundational steps is conducting a thorough asset discovery to identify malicious or rogue assets across the internal network and cloud infrastructures. Since each asset could harbor specific vulnerabilities, comprehensive visibility is needed to inform mitigation plans.
2. Classification. Not all vulnerabilities pose equal risk, so the identified issues must be triaged and classified based on severity and potential impact on the organization's network. This formal risk assessment allows for prioritizing the most critical exposure areas.
3. Prioritization. Once vulnerabilities are classified, security teams can strategically prioritize remediation to focus on the most critical risks. This prioritization guides the implementation roadmap for deploying mitigations systematically.
4. Monitoring. Attack surfaces are dynamic, so monitoring must be a perpetual process to quickly reveal new vulnerabilities as they emerge across the digital estate. Rapid discovery allows rapid response before exposures are exploited.

How to implement Attack Surface Management

Even a small enterprise can have an immense attack surface. Hackers can leverage every internet-facing asset to gain entry into the internal network. Many Attack Surface Management vendors promise that theirs is a one-click solution, but its implementation is a multi-step process.

Finding vulnerabilities and patching them up before an attacker does it helps to maintain the organization's security. A strong vulnerability management program and ongoing cybersecurity vulnerability assessment can dramatically decrease risks.

How can NordLayer help?

NordLayer provides a Security Service Edge, or SSE-focused network management solution, to address dynamic organizations' needs. It offers a complete overview of the company's network, allowing its segmentation into separate teams and gateways and minimizing the attack surface.

With NordLayer, you can deny connections from jailbroken devices to protect your network from potential risks. This can be incredibly beneficial for businesses by bringing their device policies, which usually have a large attack surface. It's a great starting point to control your internal network better and minimize business exposure to online threats.

Contact our team and discover more about our approach that could improve your organization's security status.

Attack Surface Management FAQ

Are there any attack surface management tools?

Yes, there are several commercial attack surface management solutions and platforms available from cybersecurity vendors. These tools are designed to help organizations automatically discover, monitor, and assess their entire external attack surface across internet-facing known and unknown assets.

These solutions use techniques like network scanning, code analysis, data mining, and threat intelligence to continuously map an organization's internet exposure across web apps, domains, IPs, code repositories, and more. They can detect unknown/rogue assets, monitor for misconfigured systems, and prioritize remediation based on risk.

How can an organization protect itself from cyber-attacks?

Attack surface management can help organizations minimize risk and protect against possible attack vectors by providing continuous visibility and monitoring of internal and external assets in the organization's network. By identifying and prioritizing the remediation of known vulnerabilities and security gaps, organizations can minimize their attack surface visibility and protect against potential threats.

Security teams and threat intelligence can also provide an attack surface management solution to help security leaders decide where to focus their resources. Continuous discovery and penetration testing can also help identify new attack vectors and ensure that the organization's exposure management strategy is current.

What are the benefits of attack surface management?

Attack surface management (ASM) helps you see your organization like an attacker would. Its main benefits are:

• Complete visibility: It discovers all your internet-facing assets, including forgotten systems and shadow IT, so you know what to protect.
• Risk reduction: It identifies and prioritizes the most exposed vulnerabilities, letting you fix the most critical weaknesses first.
• Greater efficiency: It automates the manual work of asset discovery and monitoring, saving your security team time and resources.

What challenges do organizations face with attack surface management?

A primary challenge is managing a constantly changing and expanding attack surface. With many operations now in the cloud, the traditional, fixed network perimeter no longer exists, making it difficult to monitor and secure a global network that lies beyond traditional firewalls. This surface also grows daily as new assets join the network, requiring automated strategies to secure publicly exposed assets.

Another significant challenge is organizational. Security teams are often siloed and geographically distributed across remote networks or multinational offices. This can hinder collaboration when trying to monitor and map the attack surface, making it difficult for teams to work together toward the common goal of threat prevention.

What’s the difference between an attack surface and a cyber threat?

The key difference is that an attack surface represents all potential entry points, while a cyber threat is the actual danger that could use them.

Think of your company's security as a house: the attack surface is every possible way in—all the doors, windows, and weak spots—whereas a threat is the burglar actively trying to get through one. Therefore, an attack surface is the collection of vulnerabilities an attacker could exploit, while a threat is a specific malicious action, like malware or ransomware, that aims to compromise your security.

What is external attack surface management?

The external attack surface refers specifically to the components exposed to the public internet—websites, servers, cloud infrastructure, and resources reachable from outside the corporate network. This area is most vulnerable to attack by external cyber threat actors. Robust cyber attack surface management and security operations are critical for preventing breaches, data exposure, and system compromises originating from internet-based attacks.