The right ASM tools include understanding where the real risk lies

​Finding the vulnerabilities where companies aren’t looking

While companies are just scratching the surface of understanding their Internet-facing architecture, hackers have been monitoring growing attack surfaces to find vulnerabilities where companies aren’t looking (or maybe not prioritizing) and reaping the reward.

A growing tech stack and fast development widen the attack surface. A lot of things can go unnoticed because of the speed and scale of development. The exposed attack surface increases every time a web-facing asset is made public. Security often has a tough time maintaining visibility over every single one of these events. Enter attack surface monitoring, where you zoom out of vulnerability scanning of code to continuously look for the possible weaknesses across your digital surface.

Managing risk across expanding attack surfaces is now perhaps the most urgent priority for the enterprise. Monitoring points of software vulnerability in hyperscale cloud environments with so many easy-to-integrate APIs, cloud applications, and endless third-party threats has become mission-critical. We’ve seen so many breaches in the past few years simply because an organization didn’t have proper web Attack Surface Management (ASM) in place. For example, it could be caused by mistakenly exposing a server, web application, S3 bucket, or not understanding the significant risk associated with those easy-to-integrate APIs that deliver instant functionality.

In a recent 2021 ranking by cyber research company Comparitech, Coalfire emerged as one of the top ASM solutions on the market today. The review confirmed that IT security has quickly accelerated beyond traditional point-in-time testing, and continuous external monitoring has become fundamental to operational resilience and business survival.

In this review, the Coalfire ASM automation platform was noted for its offensive capabilities to crawl through websites, list all external services, discover contributing asset chains, and compile asset inventories that come together in developing an effective defense. Additionally, Coalfire was the only provider in the review that deploys within a managed services delivery system, and it is this combination of our ASM platform architecture and veteran risk assessment team that constitutes what is perhaps the security industry’s most thorough, risk-based attack surface management solution. 

Zooming Out of the Web App Layer

Today, companies are taking a deeper look and stepping back from Vulnerability Management to look at the External Attack Surface as the starting point of web security. With attack surface monitoring, you will get a big picture view of all exposed web interfaces and hosted services. Mitigating misconfiguration in the infrastructure minimizes risk to prevent attacks from happening further down the road. By combining both, you can discover critical vulnerabilities in areas easily missed by untrained eyes before the attackers exploit them.

With growing pressure from far-flung workers, vendors, contractors, supply chains, IoT, device proliferation, and hyperscale omni-cloud environments, the digital footprint for every enterprise is becoming more complex by the day. Coalfire’s Attack Surface Management offering combines the industry’s largest and most experienced penetration testing team with the methodology and tooling required for continuous insight into how well you are managing your external attack surface.

To learn more about our ASM solutions, please visit: 
our offensive security page.