Unlock Total Visibility: How Attack Surface Management & Vulnerability Management Tools Work Together

The Critical Role of Vulnerability Management Solutions

Vulnerability management tools are an integral part of the modern security tech stack, especially for compliance and patch management. In a threat landscape wrought with increasingly frequent attacks, the best vulnerability management software can provide security teams with an important means of threat detection and risk management. Traditional security vulnerability management solutions automate detection so that teams can discover new vulnerabilities, determine vulnerability risk, and protect their web applications and network systems more swiftly.

Core Functions of a Typical Vulnerability Management Program:

A comprehensive vulnerability management platform typically includes:

• Continuous Scanning: Vulnerability management tools continuously scan your systems, searching for known vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. Continuous vulnerability management is crucial for staying ahead of emerging threats.
• Risk Assessment: Once vulnerabilities are discovered by the vulnerability scanner, vulnerability management tools evaluate their risk severity.
• Prioritization: A good vulnerability management platform conducts a vulnerability assessment to help security teams prioritize which vulnerabilities to address first.
• Remediation: After prioritizing, vulnerability management tools provide guidance on how to fix the issues.
• Monitoring and Reporting: Vulnerability management is an ongoing process. Leading tools support vulnerability monitoring by tracking the status of vulnerabilities and ensuring they are addressed over time.

Where Vulnerability Management Tools Fall Short

Though vulnerability management tools have an important role in cybersecurity, they typically focus on scanning known assets and patching known vulnerabilities, often missing critical misconfigurations. This means security teams need to tell vulnerability management platforms which assets to scan. Vulnerability management tools don’t map your attack surface or uncover new assets on their own.

Unknown Assets = Blind Spots

Despite what organizations may believe, most do not have a complete, accurate inventory of all of the internet-connected assets that make up their attack surface. In fact, Censys finds that up to 80% of an organization’s attack surface is unknown.
When assets on the attack surface are unknown, vulnerability management tools can’t monitor them for exposures, and they become prime points of entry for attackers.

Lack of Real-Time Data

To stay ahead of threat actors, security teams need to know about vulnerabilities and their potential impact to the organization in real time. Without continuous attack surface discovery, updates to the asset inventories that vulnerability management tools rely on may only occur on a periodic basis, such as weekly or monthly. This creates delays and significant security gaps.

Attack Surface Management: Closing the Gaps

The good news? Complementary cybersecurity tools can fill the gap. Unlike a vulnerability management product, Attack Surface Management (ASM) takes a broader, more proactive approach. It’s designed to continuously monitor all internet-facing assets that could be exposed to potential attackers. ASM is part of a larger exposure management strategy, and provides real-time visibility into everything that makes up the organization’s attack surface, including traditional, unknown, and shadow IT assets.

• Vulnerability management tools focus on fixing known weaknesses in systems you already know exist.
• Attack Surface Management deals with discovering and managing all possible entry points, even those you may not be aware of.

Attack Surface Management vs. Vulnerability Management

When it comes to securing your organization’s digital assets, both vulnerability management and Attack Surface Management play essential roles. However, each offers distinct advantages that can significantly impact your security posture.

Understanding the key differences between these two solutions can help you optimize your defenses and ensure comprehensive protection against evolving threats.

Key Differences:

• Scope of Focus: Vulnerability management solutions focus on vulnerabilities in known systems and assets. ASM looks at the entire attack surface, including hidden or forgotten assets that could be exploited.
• Visibility: Security vulnerability management solutions typically provide application security by scanning specific, managed assets. ASM provides visibility into the entire external attack surface, including unmanaged third-party systems.
• Proactive vs. Reactive: Vulnerability management platforms are more reactive, fixing issues as they are found. ASM is proactive, continuously searching for new assets and monitoring changes in real-time.

While traditional vulnerability management tools can be slow and rely heavily on the CVE database, which creates noisy data, ASM helps close visibility gaps and works seamlessly with vulnerability management systems to enhance overall cybersecurity.

Why Attack Surface Management Is Critical

As organizations embrace cloud services, remote workforces, and third-party vendors, their attack surfaces are expanding rapidly. Traditional security tools struggle to keep up with these changes, leaving gaps that can be exploited by cyber attackers. Attack Surface Management is designed to address these challenges, offering security teams the visibility and control needed to safeguard their digital assets effectively.

1. Complete Visibility: ASM helps security teams get a complete view of all potential exposure points, including the ones they may not be aware of, such as unsanctioned cloud instances or forgotten digital assets.
2. Shadow IT Risks: One of the biggest challenges for organizations is shadow IT—unapproved or unmanaged systems that employees or teams set up without the knowledge of the security team. These can be significant weak points in an organization’s defenses. ASM helps identify these hidden systems, ensuring that nothing is left exposed.
3. Reducing Business Risk: Even a small, unmanaged internet-facing asset can serve as a gateway into the rest of your network. ASM minimizes this risk by making sure that everything exposed to the internet is known, monitored, and managed.
4. Continuous Monitoring: Unlike traditional vulnerability management, which usually works in periodic scans, ASM operates continuously, adapting to changes in the environment as they happen. This is critical for catching newly exposed assets and emerging threats as soon as they appear.

Achieving Total Visibility with Censys Attack Surface Management

Censys is the leading provider of Attack Surface Management. Censys ASM identifies and prioritizes advanced threats and exposures across your entire external attack surface.

Censys leverages its industry-leading internet scanning data to provide near real-time visibility into all of your internet and cloud assets, whether known or unknown. This information empowers security teams to aggregate, prioritize, and remediate advanced threats and exposures – and is what allows Censys to discover 65% more of organizations’ attack surfaces than leading competitors.

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Key Benefits of Censys ASM

With Censys ASM, security teams are uniquely empowered to:

• Act Fast: Accelerate response times to malicious attacks with Censys’ daily scans, rapid response alerts, and effective endpoint monitoring. Stay ahead with the latest data, actionable remediation instructions, and clear dashboards, for effective decision-making in critical situations.
• Reduce Breaches: Security professionals can’t protect what they can’t see. Empower your team with comprehensive visibility and context-rich remediation guidance to reduce the likelihood of a breach by 50%.
• Optimize Security: Automate asset discovery to increase your team’s efficiency by 30%, eliminating time-consuming manual discovery and ad hoc data sifting, while reducing productivity loss due to breaches.
• Executive Reporting: Visualize cybersecurity posture and gain meaningful insights for executive reporting with Censys’ comprehensive dashboards and rich context.

Censys ASM Features & Functionality

Censys ASM is rich with powerful features that can make detecting vulnerabilities and securing your attack surface easier than ever:

• Integrations Marketplace: Onboard any integration with any vendor (including vulnerability management vendors) in 15 minutes or less to deliver a streamlined, automated, and integrated security ecosystem.
• Attribution Engine: Gain a complete and automated view of your organization’s perimeter, establish connections with high confidence using seed data, and increase your visibility up to 80%.
• Cloud Connectors: Easy to use, flexible, and secure hosted cloud connectors with daily asset ingestion and major cloud service providers support.
• Rapid Response: Safeguard your attack surface with lightning-fast identification and prioritization of zero-day vulnerabilities.
• Risk Triage and Prioritization: Update and measure each asset daily against 300+ risk fingerprints to make priorities clear.
• Risk Context and Remediation Guide: Simplify security decisions by following the precise risk context and remediation guidance provided.
• Dashboards & Interactive Reporting: Visualize your attack surface state and security with easy-to-understand dashboards and trends.

Gaining Deeper CVE Context with Censys

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) data is a critical resource for security operations and threat response teams who need to be able to act on timely and accurate vulnerability information.

Unlike other cyber risk management tools, Censys provides contextualized, real-time insight into CVEs, so that teams can prioritize remediation efforts, receive timely insights into vulnerable infrastructure, understand potential attack vectors, and reduce risks. With access to Censys’ CVE threat intelligence, you can quickly find hosts with outdated software or known vulnerabilities to help assess and prioritize risk levels effectively.

Proactive Rapid Response to Vulnerabilities

Importantly, Censys ASM proactively uses CVE data to analyze customers’ attack surfaces for potential impact. When Censys detects that assets on your attack surface could be affected by a new vulnerability, you’ll be directly notified about which assets are affected, and provided insight into risk severity. Forget noisy alerts and instead benefit from CVE information that’s truly relevant to your organization.

Seamless Integration with Vulnerability Management Tools

Censys ASM integrates with major vulnerability management tools like Qualys, Tenable, and ServiceNow VR. With an ASM/vulnerability management integration, security teams can import newly found assets that their ASM solution discovers for more real-time, in-depth vulnerability scans.

Censys customers can deploy an integration with their existing vulnerability management tool in 15 minutes or less through the Censys Integrations Marketplace.

Complement Your Vulnerability Management Strategy with Censys ASM

Take the next step to achieving total visibility into vulnerabilities with Censys ASM. Contact our team today to learn more about how Censys can enhance your approach to managing vulnerabilities.

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