Penetration testing, for example, can test for suspected vulnerabilities in known assets, but it can’t help security teams identify new cyber risks and vulnerabilities that arise daily.īut ASM‘s continuous workflow and hacker’s perspective enable security teams and security operations centers (SOCs) to establish a proactive security posture in the face of a constantly growing and morphing attack surface. Traditional asset discovery, risk assessment and vulnerability management processes, which were developed when corporate networks were more stable and centralized, can‘t keep up with the speed at which new vulnerabilities and attack vectors arise in today's networks. (Randori is a subsidiary of IBM Corp.) Industry analysts at Gartner (link resides outside ibm.com) named attack surface expansion a top security and risk management priority for CISOs in 2022. ASM also addresses vulnerabilities in an organization’s physical and social engineering attack surfaces, such as malicious insiders or inadequate end-user training against phishing scams.Ĭloud adoption, digital transformation and the expansion of remote work-all accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic-have made the average company’s digital footprint and attack surface larger, more distributed and more dynamic, with new assets connecting to the company network daily.Īccording to Randori’s State of Attack Surface Management 2022 (link resides outside ibm.com) report, 67 percent of organizations have seen their attack surfaces expand in the past 12 months, and 69 percent have been compromised by an unknown or poorly managed internet-facing asset in the past year. But EASM focuses specifically on the vulnerabilities and risks presented by an organization’s external or internet-facing IT assets (sometimes referred to as an organization’s digital attack surface). ASM relies on many of the same methods and resources that hackers use, and many ASM tasks and technologies are devised and performed by ‘ethical hackers’ familiar with cybercriminals’ behaviors and skilled at duplicating their actions.Įxternal attack surface management (EASM), a relatively new ASM technology, is sometimes used interchangeably with ASM.

It identifies targets and assesses risks based on the opportunities they present to a malicious attacker.

Unlike other cybersecurity disciplines, ASM is conducted entirely from a hacker’s perspective, rather than the perspective of the defender. Attack surface management (ASM) is the continuous discovery, analysis, remediation and monitoring of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors that make up an organization’s attack surface.

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