What is attack surface analysis?
Attack surface analysis is the process of identifying, mapping, and evaluating all potential entry points—both internal and external—that an attacker could exploit to gain unauthorized access. It’s a foundational practice for modern cyber threat exposure management, helping organizations proactively reduce risk across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS environments.
The “attack surface” refers to all exposure points across your environment—anything an adversary could use to gain unauthorized access. This includes both internet-facing assets and internal services that are reachable via lateral movement.
To understand what’s involved, let’s first define some helpful terms related to attack surface analysis:
Attack surface: All points where an attacker could try to gain access
Attack vector: The specific method an attacker uses to gain access
Attack path: The sequence of steps or vectors an attacker uses to gain access
Building on these concepts, the analysis process gives you full visibility into cloud risk—highlighting exposed assets, misconfigurations, and potential attacker paths. This visibility enables security teams to resolve gaps before they become exploitable.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the importance of attack surface analysis, then go through the process step by step, including best practices to simplify the process.
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Why attack surface analysis is critical in the cloud
Cloud environments are constantly changing, with ephemeral assets, auto-scaling workloads, serverless functions, and constantly shifting infrastructure expanding the attack surface faster than traditional security tools can track.
Plus, cloud providers’ shared responsibility model can create confusion or buck-passing. In general, cloud providers secure the infrastructure, but you must secure your own data, applications, operating systems, and network controls within the cloud environment.
In the cloud, many breaches also happen due to exposed services, misconfigured access, or stolen credentials. That’s especially true now with the proliferation of non-human identities (NHIs), like service accounts, that leave APIs vulnerable.
As we’ve seen, attack surface analysis considers both obvious and hidden entry points:
Obvious entry points include login pages, public websites or web apps, email, network ports, physical access to devices, and software interfaces.
Hidden entry points include unnecessary or forgotten services, exposed APIs including forgotten credentials and over-permissioned entities, vulnerable third-party libraries, subtle cloud misconfigurations, unmanaged shadow IT, supply chain (indirect) attacks, and hidden information in metadata or errors.
Hidden entry points are harder to root out, especially if you’re using manual methods or tools that aren’t designed for the complexity of the cloud.
Today’s attackers use sophisticated, automated tools and even AI. To keep pace, your security team must do the same internally, using tools to automate attack surface analysis so you can keep on top of risks.
Components of a cloud attack surface
This process provides a comprehensive map of your cloud environment and the interconnections between exposed systems, services, and identities:
Infrastructure
Compute resources: VMs, containers, functions (FaaS)
Networking: Internet-facing IPs, load balancers, VPNs, transit gateways
Storage: Publicly accessible buckets or misconfigured storage accounts
Shadow IT: Untracked or unmanaged cloud services and accounts
Application & integration
APIs and endpoints: REST APIs, GraphQL, third-party integrations
CI/CD and build systems: Public pipelines, misconfigured artifact stores
Access & identity
Identities and permissions: Over-permissioned service accounts, exposed credentials and other security protocols, keys, and tokens
Steps to perform cloud attack surface analysis
Next, let’s take a look at best practices for each of the main steps of attack surface analysis.
| Step | Goal | Best Practices |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Discover and inventory all assets | Identify all assets (compute, network, identity, and storage components) within your environment. |
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| 2. Identify external exposure | Locate potential openings for attackers, including public IPs, open ports, and internet-facing services. |
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| 3. Map internal reachability | Understand potential channels for lateral movement like identity, network, and shared services. |
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| 4. Evaluate misconfigurations and weaknesses | Locate insecure defaults, outdated services, and excessive privileges. |
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| 5. Prioritize based on risk | Rank vulnerabilities and threats based on potential impact and likelihood. |
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| 6. Continuously monitor for drift | Continuously reassess the attack surface and update security measures to combat configuration changes over time. |
|
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Common risks revealed by attack surface analysis
What kinds of security gaps can surface during a comprehensive exposure assessment?
Here are a few examples, along with best practices for exposure management to keep your environment secure.
Publicly exposed storage
When storage is publicly exposed, like open S3 buckets or blobs, attackers can access, download, or modify sensitive data. They can then exfiltrate data, deploy ransomware, host malicious content, and pivot to other systems.
Secure publicly exposed storage with strict access controls, permissions, consistent policy enforcement, and encryption.
Forgotten cloud workloads
Cloud workloads become forgotten when they are left unmanaged, often with open ports. Unmonitored and potentially unpatched services on these workloads offer easy entry points. Attackers exploit known vulnerabilities in exposed services to gain unauthorized access.
Secure workloads through asset inventories, regular port scans, and network segmentation (including firewalls).
Identity sprawl and privilege escalation paths
Too many accounts and excessive permissions increase the risk of compromise and lateral movement. Through compromised low-privilege accounts, attackers can exploit misconfigurations to elevate their access to critical resources.
Secure identity risk by implementing least privilege, performing regular account reviews, and ensuring strong multi-factor authentication.
Orphaned resources in dev/test environments
Orphaned resources—like virtual test machines that aren’t shut down after testing is completed—pose a significant risk. These often have weaker security controls, offering a backdoor into production environments. Attackers exploit these weaker controls to gain a foothold and potentially pivot to production.
Secure environments by implementing clear resource lifecycles, enforcing consistent security policies across all environments, and regularly decommissioning unused resources.
Insecure default configurations
Systems often come with default configurations that are inherently insecure. For example, “SSH open to the world” is a default setting which will accept connection attempts from any IP address. These factory settings are well-known to attackers, who can attempt to brute-force default credentials or exploit common vulnerabilities associated with them.
Secure configurations by changing passwords on first use, restricting access based on necessity, and disabling unnecessary default services.
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How Wiz helps with attack surface analysis
Attack surface analysis is just the beginning. It should be part of a holistic approach that also reduces the attack surface, cutting risk and securing your organization’s crown jewels.
Wiz is a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) purpose-built to navigate the complexities of modern cloud exposure and risk assessments.
When you secure your environment with Wiz, asset discovery is just the beginning. Wiz validates exposures from an attacker's perspective, prioritizes risks based on real-world exploitability, and lets you assign clear ownership to drive rapid remediation.
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From a single pane of glass, Wiz guides you through all the steps of attack surface analysis—and then helps you quickly resolve any problems detected. The Wiz Security Graph connects the dots between vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity access paths, and data exposure — giving you a clear picture of how an attacker could move through your environment.
Wiz quickly secures your attack surface through…
Agentless asset discovery to automatically inventory all resources across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes
Exposure mapping to identify internet-facing assets and reachable internal workloads
Risk graph correlation to combine exposure, identity, vulnerability, and data context, letting you prioritize real attack paths
Wiz Defend to ingest runtime signals (VPC flow logs, cloud logs), helping you quickly spot active threat behavior
Custom queries, using the Wiz Security Graph to answer questions like, “Which workloads are exposed and running vulnerable software?”
Wiz correlates findings from external scanners, penetration tests, and vulnerability assessments—enriched with cloud context for a unified view of your environment’s risk posture. That cuts your risk of attack, helps fix problems before they disrupt your business, and lets you easily meet compliance requirements.
Ready to shrink your cloud attack surface and block real attack paths before they’re exploited? Get a demo and see how Wiz makes risk visible — and solvable.