Protect Your Digital Assets with Total Visibility
Discover:
- Why organizations need a continuous view of their attack surface
- What Attack Surface Management is, and why it benefits security teams
- How to choose a trusted Attack Surface Management solution
- How Censys ASM can help
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The Need for an Up-to-Date View of the Attack Surface
Achieving continuous visibility into the entire attack surface is a must for security teams. With new assets, cloud configurations, and potential attack vectors proliferating daily—sometimes without the security team’s awareness—external attack surfaces are changing faster than teams can keep up with.
Without full visibility into these dynamic, rapidly-evolving attack surfaces, security gaps emerge. Today’s threat actors are operating at unprecedented speeds, scanning for weak points as soon as vulnerabilities are announced. To have even a chance at remediating exposures before threat actors can strike, security teams need comprehensive, accurate, and continuous attack surface monitoring.
Continuous Attack Surface Management (ASM) delivers this essential visibility.
The Benefits of Continuous ASM
Continuous ASM is the process of identifying, monitoring, and securing an organization’s internet-facing assets on a continuous basis. It involves discovering all assets that could be exploited by attackers, such as IPs, domains, cloud services, and web applications, to ensure complete visibility – even as these assets change.
An automated, continuous ASM solution will arm teams with up-to-date asset inventories, enable risk management, and provide insights that allow for immediate remediation of critical vulnerabilities.
Specifically, Continuous ASM supports a proactive security posture with:
- Complete Visibility: Continuous ASM ensures you see all your internet-facing assets—known and unknown—so attackers can’t exploit what you didn’t know existed.
- Daily Updates: With daily refreshes, you’re always working with the latest view of your assets, making it easier to adapt quickly to changes like new acquisitions or cloud deployments.
- Risk-Based Prioritization: ASM doesn’t just show you everything; it helps you focus on what matters most, like vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited, saving your team time and energy.
- Cloud Coverage: Cloud assets change quickly. ASM keeps track of them for you, so nothing gets missed, even in fast-changing environments.
- Streamlined Collaboration: With all your asset information in one place, it’s easier to share insights with your team, prioritize fixes, and demonstrate improvements to stakeholders.
- Peace of Mind: Knowing your attack surface is continuously monitored and updated means fewer surprises and more confidence in your security posture.
Modern Attack Surface Management v. Traditional Approaches
Traditional methods of attack surface mapping only provide a view of the attack surface at a particular point in time. Without a continuous monitoring solution, security teams are likely conducting monthly scans but are unable to scale and support daily scanning due to resource constraints. Alternatively, they may only update when they know that new assets have been added or decommissioned from the attack surface.
However, we know that attack surfaces at organizations of all sizes are changing faster than security teams can possibly keep up with, leaving them exposed to cyber threats. Censys finds that up to 80% of the average modern attack surface is unknown as a result of attack surface change and expansion.
The Challenges of Traditional Asset Management
- Periodic Snapshots: Imagine taking a single photo of a place like Times Square and using it to understand who visited that day. That photo will only capture the people who are visible in Times Square at that moment. Yet, we know that hundreds of different people are passing through Times Square every minute. That’s how traditional asset discovery and management methods tend to work: they lack the real-time insights provided by continuous attack surface analysis.
- Labor-Intensive: Manual asset management relies on people to hunt down and catalog assets. This is time-consuming, prone to errors, and leaves gaps—especially in dynamic environments like the cloud.
- Limited Scope: Traditional methods often miss hidden or ephemeral assets (like cloud instances or shadow IT) because they’re not continuously monitored. If it wasn’t there during the snapshot, it doesn’t exist in the records.
- Slow to Respond: Security teams have to wait for the next update cycle to find new vulnerabilities or changes. By then, attackers might have already exploited an exposure.
Continuous ASM Supports Proactive Security
Continuous ASM ultimately gives security teams the insights they need to maintain a strong security posture and address critical risks. With continuous attack surface testing, organizations can validate remediation efforts, uncover hidden risks, reduce the attack surface, and enhance their security posture with confidence. Teams without continuous attack surface testing are left vulnerable to new risks and can be slow to address critical vulnerabilities that could lead to unauthorized access.
How to Choose the Right Continuous Attack Surface Management Solution
Not all attack surface solutions provide the same level of visibility needed for proactive defense. Though there are many ways to evaluate an ASM vendor (which you can read more about in our ASM Buyer’s Guide), the following are some of the most important to ensure you achieve total visibility. Without these capabilities, organizations remain vulnerable to potential attack vectors.
- Comprehensive Discovery and Attribution
- Why It Matters: An ASM solution should find everything your organization owns on the internet—even hidden, misconfigured, or forgotten assets. It should also attribute those assets to your organization with precision to avoid false positives.
- What to Ask: Does the platform use advanced methods like DNS, certificates, and cloud connectors to discover assets? How does it handle attribution accuracy?
- Daily Updates
- Why It Matters: Assets can change multiple times a day, especially in cloud environments. Your ASM platform needs to keep up with this pace, so your team isn’t operating on stale data. Threat actors are continuously scanning the internet for opportunities to strike.
- What to Ask: How frequently does the platform update its data? Does it support daily updates for critical changes?
- Automation and Scalability
- Why It Matters: Manual processes are a no-go for dynamic attack surfaces. The solution should automate repetitive tasks like asset discovery, risk assessment, and alerting, and it should scale with your organization’s growth.
- What to Ask: What aspects of the platform are automated? Is it designed to scale as the organization grows or adopts new technologies?
Measuring the Impact of a Continuous ASM Program
ASM solutions can transform security operations, enhance vulnerability management efforts, and deliver immense ROI. By monitoring the entry points of attackers and protecting sensitive data, teams can stay ahead of potential breaches.
For example, in an independent study conducted by Forrester Consulting, Censys ASM was found to deliver on average 444% ROI to customers. How can teams measure and monitor the impact of ASM within their own organizations?
Consider these four key metrics:
- Risk Reduction Over Time: Monitor how the volume of critical risks—such as open ports, vulnerable services, or misconfigured assets—decreases over time. This reflects the proactive remediation enabled by the ASM solution. A leading ASM solution like Censys will have trends and benchmark dashboards that will show you how risk volume in your attack surface is changing over time.
- Visibility Metrics: Start by comparing the total number of assets discovered before implementing ASM to what’s found afterward. This includes previously unknown assets, like shadow IT, misconfigurations, or cloud resources.
- Risk Prioritization Efficiency: Evaluate how effectively your team is focusing on the most critical risks. Metrics might include the percentage of vulnerabilities remediated that align with actively exploited CVEs or high-priority issues. Censys ASM will automatically track which risks are remediated in your attack surface, and provide a view of which critical risks were addressed and when.
- Speed of Remediation: Assess the average time to discover and remediate critical vulnerabilities before and after ASM implementation. A shorter remediation cycle will indicate a stronger security posture.
How Censys Delivers Continuous Visibility into the Attack Surface
Censys ASM is the industry’s leading Attack Surface Management solution. Unlike other ASM vendors, Censys leverages its proprietary internet intelligence to deliver a complete, accurate, and up-to-date view of global internet infrastructure. No other ASM vendor has access to the same fidelity of data.
This unrivaled dataset is what allows Censys to map and monitor attack surfaces faster, and with more accuracy, than anyone else.
As a Censys ASM user, you’ll benefit from:
- Unmatched Breadth and Depth
- Censys uncovers up to 65% more assets than competitors, ensuring comprehensive visibility across your internet-facing attack surface.
- From misconfigured cloud buckets to obscure subdomains and non-standard port services, Censys finds what others miss.
- Up-to-Date, Dynamic Monitoring
- With daily updates and cloud integrations refreshing up to six times a day, Censys delivers the most current view of your exposures.
- On-demand rescans and automated alerts let you respond to changes and emerging threats immediately.
- Context and Prioritization
- Censys integrates with threat intelligence sources, like CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, to help you focus on the highest-risk vulnerabilities.
- Seamless Integration with Your Workflow
- Censys works with the tools you already use, including SIEMs, SOAR platforms, and ticketing systems, for effortless operational fit.
- Customizable alerts and reporting dashboards make it simple to keep your team and stakeholders informed.
- Transparent and Actionable Insights
- Censys provides detailed discovery paths and evidence for asset attribution, so you can trust the data and act confidently.
- Dashboards and reports highlight trends, measure impact, and demonstrate ROI to leadership.
- Proactive and Scalable
- Censys doesn’t just catalog assets—it enables you to proactively reduce risks by addressing exposures before attackers exploit them.
- It’s built to scale with your organization, adapting seamlessly as your infrastructure evolves.
Read more about the Censys attack surface discovery process in our blog, “Attack Surface Discovery: Without Visibility, Security Is Just Guesswork.”
Stay Ahead with Continuous Visibility
The Bottom Line: Traditional methods of Attack Surface Management can’t keep up with rapidly-changing attack surfaces and aggressive threat actors.
Censys ASM equips your security team with the tools and insights to continuously uncover, monitor, and remediate vulnerabilities—before attackers can exploit them.
With continuous visibility, automated prioritization, and actionable intelligence, you’ll not only be able to protect your organization today, but build a resilient security posture for the future.
Don’t settle for outdated snapshots or incomplete inventories—partner with Censys to stay one step ahead of threats.
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