Quick refresher: What is attack surface management?
Attack surface management is the process of finding, inventorying, and monitoring all internal and internet-facing assets and possible entry points that attackers could exploit.
Your attack surface includes every poorly encrypted API, invoicing system with access to your network, misconfigured cloud bucket, insecure web form, abandoned server with unpatched software, and identity with excessive permissions that can expose critical assets.
So why do you need a separate tool to manage your attack surface? Why isn’t traditional vulnerability management (VM) enough? ASM spans both external and internal views. External ASM (EASM) emphasizes an attacker’s outside-in perspective, continuously discovering internet-facing assets and exposures. Internal ASM – often called CAASM (Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management) – leverages cloud APIs to discover and correlate internal assets, misconfigurations, and identity relationships. This goes beyond plain asset scanning to map exposure paths and prioritize what matters most to your business.
Expose cloud risks no other tool can
Learn how Wiz Cloud surfaces toxic combinations across misconfigurations, identities, vulnerabilities, and data—so you can take action fast.
ASM vs. EASM vs. CAASM: What’s the difference?
Attack Surface Management (ASM): The broad process of discovering, inventorying, and monitoring all digital assets and potential entry points – internal and external.
External ASM (EASM): Focuses on internet-facing assets and exposures visible to attackers.
Cyber Asset ASM (CAASM): Maps internal cloud assets, configurations, and identity relationships using cloud APIs.
Key capabilities to evaluate in attack surface management tools
When you’re shopping for an ASM solution, you’re not just looking for a tool that can find cloud attack surface vulnerabilities—any tool can do that. What you need is a tool that can map your entire attack surface from one end to another in a single view.
You’re looking for a tool that totally abstracts blind spots and shadow deployments, connects the dots from entry point to attack path to target asset, and tells you exactly how to fix issues.
This kind of tool offers:
Cloud-native asset discovery
Prioritize solutions offering agentless discovery across all major cloud providers. The benefits are massive: Agentless tools let you deploy rapidly for faster ROI and reduce operational overhead. Keep in mind that ‘agentless’ doesn’t mean zero setup – these tools still require API integrations and permissions – but compared to agent-based approaches, they scale faster and avoid performance drag on your infrastructure.
Also, agentless scanning dynamically adjusts to ephemeral workloads and auto-scaling environments, providing you real-time discovery capabilities and continuous cloud posture visibility without missing anything (think shadow deployments, vulnerable dependencies, and more).
But discovery isn’t enough. Check that a potential tool offers asset inventory, tagging, and classification by functionality, ownership, compliance requirements, business criticality, and identity relationships (who or what can access assets). Leading ASM solutions should also include API and certificate discovery to close common blind spots.
Coverage
Evaluate coverage of both internal cloud assets and external-facing services, including backend microservices, containers, serverless functions, managed databases, storage buckets, identities and entitlements, APIs (including shadow and zombie APIs), DNS records, and TLS certificates.
The degree of coverage determines how comprehensive the tool’s inventorying and correlation capabilities are—and these two factors add up to how thorough you can expect threat detection abilities to be. Remember: You don’t want myopic, perimeter-based ASM, which is usually accompanied by visibility gaps.
Integration and workflow automation
Make deep integration a focal point:
Assess integration with SIEM, SOAR, and ticketing systems to facilitate automated response workflows, which let you contain threats faster and minimize potential damage.
Evaluate integration with developer tools, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code scanning to support shift-left DevSecOps practices (like early and continuous detection).
Assess API availability and webhook support for custom integrations and automation.
Look for enterprise RBAC, SSO integration, SCIM-based provisioning where applicable, and access/audit logging capabilities to limit unauthorized access and simplify governance.
Verify multi-tenant support if you’re a large organization that needs to streamline ASM.
Round-the-clock monitoring plus remediation
Go for tools offering ongoing assessments that enable faster detection, rather than periodic checks that discover issues after the fact.
When you’ve nailed down continuous monitoring, look for integration with cloud provider APIs and policy/IaC guardrails (for example, Azure Policy deny/modify and validated deployment workflows) to prevent drift and reduce operational risk. You’ll want support for both types of remediation:
Automated remediation for common misconfigurations and exposure scenarios
Guided remediation workflows (complete with code snippets) for more complicated issues
In addition to shortening MTTR and cutting the attack window, these remediation options empower developers to deploy secure software and resolve risks early.
Finally, to automatically prevent future exposures, prioritize solutions offering policy-as-code integration.
Top 7 attack surface management tools for 2025
Benchmarking the hundreds of attack surface management tools on the market against the essential capabilities discussed above is no easy feat. So we’ve compiled notable solutions, their capabilities, and G2/Gartner external attack surface management rankings to help.
These top 7 tools are a good place to start:
1. Wiz
Description: Cloud-native security platform delivering full-spectrum attack surface management via an agentless Security Graph approach
Capabilities:
Discovers and auto-maps every cloud asset, relationship, and attack path in real time—across any multi-cloud setup
Risk prioritization by exploitability, asset criticality, exposure, and business context cuts through noise fast
Unique features: Toxic combination detection, attack path analysis, and deep correlation of attack surface findings with identity risks and misconfigurations
Top pick for: Teams wanting unified cloud security with graph-driven risk prioritization and serious alert fatigue reduction
Edge: Wiz is the first and only platform to unify posture, identity, and vulnerability context across the entire cloud and CI/CD pipeline in an at-a-glance Security Graph, providing complete code-to-cloud visibility.
| Rating source | Aggregated rating | Review count |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | 4.7 | 703 |
| Gartner | 4.7 | 296 |
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2. CyCognito external attack surface management (EASM)
Description: An EASM platform that methodically uncovers internet-facing assets and exposures
Capabilities:
Often paired with platforms like Wiz to extend internal cloud visibility with an external attacker’s perspective. CyCognito’s strength lies in its seedless discovery engine, which uncovers both managed and shadow assets without relying on cloud provider APIs.
“Seedless” discovery engine finds both managed and shadow assets—without relying on cloud provider APIs
Best for: Organizations seeking validation at scale who want to complement their code-to-cloud visibility with an external attacker's view of their internet-facing assets
Edge: Attacker-centric methodology (via continuous DAST scanning) plus exhaustive reconnaissance capabilities
| Rating source | Aggregated rating | Review count |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | 4.3 | 5 |
| Gartner | 4.7 | 38 |
3. Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse
Description: Offers external attack surface mapping across connected systems and unknown exposures as part of the Cortex platform
Capabilities:
Discovers active risks by incorporating threat intelligence scans of the entire internet
Provides built-in playbooks for reducing the external attack surface
Ideal for: Enterprises that are already running Palo Alto solutions or those seeking tight security operations integration
Edge: RDP exposure management and active internet-facing asset discovery
| Rating source | Aggregated rating | Review count |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | — | — |
| Gartner | 4.5 | 44 |
4. Mandiant Advantage Attack Surface Management
Description: Mandiant Advantage ASM (part of Google Cloud’s Mandiant unit), built to assess risks to organizations’ exposed assets (like their domain, networks, and SaaS accounts)
Capabilities:
Focuses on the adversary’s viewpoint, leveraging Google Cloud’s native security features
Discovers and manages asset risks based on pre-specified business outcomes
Ideal for: Organizations with Google Cloud–based environments who want to focus on an attacker’s perspective
Edge: Mandiant IOC detection, fused with benign payload-based exploitability probes and Google Cloud–native integration
| Rating source | Aggregated rating | Review count |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | 4.5 | 1 |
| Gartner | 4.2 | 30 |
5. Tenable Attack Surface Management
Description: Part of Tenable’s exposure management lineup; blends ASM and vulnerability management for unified visibility
Capabilities:
Hooks directly into Tenable’s vulnerability database and research for up-to-date risk context
Adds technical and business context to CVSS for deep exposure scoring
Good fit for: Organizations that prioritize quantifying vulnerabilities and threats to their external attack surface
| Rating source | Aggregated rating | Review count |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | 4.0 | 1 |
| Gartner | 4.6 | 626 |
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6. Rapid7 Surface Command
Description: A tiered suite of tools offering EASM, plus vulnerability management for premium users
Capabilities:
Strong on blast radius mapping for external exposures
Endpoint-to-cloud attack surface mapping
Good choice for: Organizations that want to scale into higher-tier plans like Exposure Command Ultimate, which expands remediation and SOAR integration. Note: while Rapid7 provides strong external attack surface mapping, its multi-cloud visibility is more limited compared to dedicated cloud-native ASM platforms.
Edge: Tiered pricing accommodates businesses with smaller budgets (albeit with limited functionality)
| Rating source | Aggregated rating | Review count |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | 3.8 | 11 |
| Gartner | 4.1 | 7 |
7. Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management (Defender EASM)
Description: Microsoft’s native ASM offering, directly integrated into the Defender suite and the Azure ecosystem
Capabilities:
Uses discovery seeds to continuously inventory assets and model the attack surface
Correlates assets, permissions, and vulnerability findings to generate attack surface insights
Ideal for: Organizations running Microsoft 365 and Azure who are looking for out-of-the-box compatibility
Edge: Offers natural-language–assisted query generation within the Defender ecosystem (where available), lowering the barrier for advanced querying.
| Rating source | Aggregated rating | Review count |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | 4.3 | 17 |
| Gartner | 4.3 | 106 |
How Wiz leads attack surface management innovation
When it comes to internal and external attack surface management, a number of key capabilities put Wiz ahead of the pack:
The Wiz Security Graph: Wiz maps relationships between assets, identities, and attack paths to increase alert fidelity while letting you quickly see the context behind the attack surface. Simply put, the Wiz Security Graph visualizes how attackers would exploit your attack surface and shows you at a glance why a prioritized risk is truly critical.
Robust threat data integration: Aside from connecting with key vulnerability databases and integrating live threat intelligence, Wiz actively hunts threats and vulnerabilities in cloud services, third-party libraries, and GenAI models.
So instead of guessing about potential adversary targets as many ASM tools do, Wiz incorporates evidence-based findings into our spectrum of cloud security solutions, providing security teams with ready-to-use searches that help them fix emerging threats fast. We also integrate attack frameworks like MITRE for an up-to-date view of attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures.
Agentless approach: Our agentless-first approach delivers seamless deployment, fast time to value, and dynamic discovery of internal and internet-facing ephemeral workloads and shadow assets.
Integration across the development lifecycle: With our out-of-the-box CI pipeline integration, IDE visibility, IaC scanning, and runtime protection, Wiz is known for our solid support for shift-left security.
Remediation has never been easier: Accelerate time to fix with automated fixes and guided remediation at the exact line of code causing the issue.
Ready to reduce your external and internal attack surface? Get a free attack surface assessment to see prioritized risks and fastest remediation paths.
Expose cloud risks no other tool can
Learn how Wiz Cloud surfaces toxic combinations across misconfigurations, identities, vulnerabilities, and data—so you can take action fast.
