What is Attack Surface Management?

Understanding Attack Surface Management

Attack Surface Management (ASM) addresses a fundamental challenge in modern security—you can’t protect what you don’t know exists. As organizations embrace cloud services, shadow IT, mergers and acquisitions, and rapid development practices, their attack surface expands in ways that traditional asset management often fails to capture. ASM platforms continuously discover and inventory internet-exposed assets, assess their security posture, and prioritize risks based on exploitability and business impact. Unlike point-in-time vulnerability scans, these tools monitor the attack surface as it evolves, alerting to new exposures, misconfigurations, or vulnerable components as they appear. Advanced platforms leverage attacker techniques to identify subtle exposures like forgotten subdomains, orphaned cloud resources, or sensitive data exposed through development repositories. Organizations use ASM to complement internal asset management, providing an outside-in view that reveals how their infrastructure appears to potential attackers. Effective implementation requires clearly defined scoping to determine which assets should be monitored, integration with vulnerability management and incident response processes, and established procedures for handling newly discovered exposures.