External Attack Surface Management (EASM) continuously discovers and monitors internet-facing assets to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them—automated 24/7 by Secure.com’s Digital Security Teammates.
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) can help you discover, monitor, and assess all internet-facing assets across an organization's online footprint. They identify vulnerabilities based on real-world exploitability and business impact, deliver timely alerts when exposure changes, and suggest actionable reporting to reduce cyber risk before attackers can exploit them.
Cloud migration, SaaS adoption, remote workforces, and third-party integrations each create new exposure points that traditional security tools struggle to track. Every internet-facing asset, which includes apps, APIs, cloud storage buckets, forgotten subdomains, and shadow IT, can create a potential entry point for attackers.
Assets appear, change, and disappear constantly, often outside the visibility of traditional EASM security tools. Periodic vulnerability scans and internal asset inventories struggle to keep up, leaving unknown or unmanaged assets exposed.
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) closes this gap by providing continuous, outside-in visibility into your organization's digital presence before attackers exploit it. By automatically discovering assets, monitoring exposure changes, and evaluating risks based on context, EASM enables security teams to proactively reduce the attack surface.
EASM platforms continuously scan the public internet to identify and monitor all assets associated with your organization—including shadow IT, forgotten subdomains, and infrastructure deployed outside IT's visibility.
Usually, it involves:
Visibility alone is not enough. EASM transforms asset discovery into protection by continuously assessing exposure and linking findings to remediation actions. Once assets are identified, platforms evaluate misconfigurations, outdated software, exposed credentials, and known vulnerabilities.
By correlating this data with threat intelligence and asset context, EASM highlights the issues that pose real risk—not just theoretical weaknesses. This contextual prioritization is critical: security teams drowning in 11,000+ daily alerts need to focus on what actually matters, not chase every CVE. Security teams can then remediate the most critical exposures first, reducing the likelihood of exploitation and limiting attack paths.
EASM focuses specifically on internet-facing assets that are visible to external attackers. This includes:
While the project documents don't explicitly define CAASM, they do describe Internal ASM as the complement to EASM:
Traditional vulnerability management relies heavily on CVE identifiers and CVSS scores, which often fail to reflect real-world risk. EASM platforms go further by applying contextual risk analysis that considers:
Not all assets carry equal risk. EASM platforms incorporate asset criticality by evaluating factors such as:
Top EASM platforms operate continuously, monitoring assets for changes in configuration, exposure, or vulnerability status. When new assets are discovered, ports are opened, certificates expire, or high-risk vulnerabilities emerge, alerts are generated in near real time.
This detection reduces the window of exposure, which is the time between when a weakness appears and when it is addressed, lowering breach risk. In practice, this translates to shifting from months of exposure (typical with quarterly scans) to hours or minutes with continuous External Attack Surface monitoring.
Modern EASM solutions enable teams to customize alerts by severity, asset type, or business impact. Alerts integrate with existing security workflows—no rip-and-replace required—including:
EASM systems deliver high-level dashboards that give executives and security leaders a clear view of external risk posture—no more managing several tools or translating technical findings into business language. These dashboards typically show:
Such visibility supports data-driven decision-making and helps demonstrate security progress to leadership and boards.
For practitioners, EASM delivers detailed operational reports, including:
During an incident, speed and context are critical. EASM provides responders with immediate visibility into affected assets, their exposure history, and associated vulnerabilities—eliminating the manual investigation that typically delays containment. This helps teams:
Beyond reactive response, EASM enables proactive threat hunting. Security teams can analyze historical exposure data, correlate findings with threat intelligence (including MITRE ATT&CK mappings and IOCs), and search for patterns that indicate malicious activity or emerging risks—often before alerts are triggered.
Third-party vendors often have direct or indirect exposure to your environment—and their security gaps become your security gaps. EASM extends visibility beyond owned assets to monitor vendor-associated infrastructure, shared domains, and exposed services that could impact your organization.
This outside-in perspective helps identify risks that traditional vendor questionnaires or point-in-time audits may miss—like exposed credentials, misconfigured cloud storage, or forgotten test environments that appear after the audit is complete.
EASM takes an outside-in approach, continuously discovering and monitoring all internet-facing assets—including unknown ones—rather than scanning a predefined internal asset list on a periodic basis.
Yes. Most EASM solutions integrate with SIEM, SOAR, ticketing systems, and vulnerability management platforms to streamline remediation and incident response workflows.
EASM platforms operate continuously, combining real-time monitoring with frequent automated scans to detect changes as soon as they occur.
No. EASM is entirely external and non-intrusive, relying on internet-based reconnaissance rather than agents or internal credentials.
Organizations of all sizes benefit, but EASM is especially valuable for growing, cloud-first, and digitally complex environments where asset sprawl and third-party exposure are common.
EASM determins multiple vulnerabilities by verifying versions against CVE databases, while on the other hand vulnerability assessment tests systems to confirm if they're exploitable.
As organizations face the Headcount Gap Crisis—with 12,486 unfilled security seats and an average of 247 days to hire—automated EASM capabilities become essential for lean security teams to sustain oversight without scaling headcount linearly.
As digital environments expand across cloud platforms, SaaS applications, APIs, and partner ecosystems, maintaining precise visibility into internet-facing assets is no longer optional.
The best EASM solutions work as Digital Security Teammates—augmenting your team's capabilities rather than adding another dashboard to monitor.
By supporting incident response, allowing proactive threat hunting, and extending visibility to third-party risks, EASM helps organizations move from reactive defense to proactive risk reduction.
Security posture assessment evaluates your organization's overall cybersecurity strength, identifying vulnerabilities and providing a roadmap to enhance your defense against evolving threats.
A major source code leak exposes how routine age-verification selfies for popular apps are feeding a massive government surveillance and reporting machine.
A severe vulnerability in popular Grandstream desk phones gives attackers root access to listen to calls and pivot into corporate networks—highlighting a major blind spot for small businesses.