What is EASM?
External attack surface management (EASM) is a cybersecurity practice that continuously discovers and secures internet-facing assets that attackers can exploit. It identifies vulnerabilities in websites, APIs, cloud services, and network infrastructure before cybercriminals can leverage them for breaches.
Unlike internal security measures, EASM focuses specifically on assets visible from the public internet. This proactive approach helps organizations reduce their digital footprint and prevent external threats from finding entry points into their systems, a critical goal when a reactive security posture is financially unsustainable, with the average breach costing organizations $4.45 million per incident.
There is a common misconception that EASM is exclusively for large companies, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Imagine a small company whose web application was built on a cloud computing framework, with their data hosted on a remote server. Their external attack surface expands to include common vulnerabilities of a web application, such as a SQL injection (SQLi) or a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. Human error is also part of the equation: A misconfiguration of the cloud environment could potentially lead to unauthorized access to sensitive information.
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EASM solutions address these challenges through three core capabilities:
Automated vulnerability discovery: Continuously scans internet-facing assets to identify security weaknesses, misconfigurations, and exposed services without manual intervention.
Risk-based prioritization: Evaluates threats based on exploitability, business impact, and exposure level to help teams focus on the most critical vulnerabilities first.
Real-time monitoring: Provides ongoing surveillance of external assets, alerting security teams immediately when new vulnerabilities emerge or configurations change.
How does EASM work?
EASM operates through a cyclical process designed to provide continuous visibility and protection. The process generally involves four key stages:
Discovery: EASM solutions continuously scan the public internet to identify all digital assets connected to an organization. This includes known domains, unknown subdomains, IP addresses, cloud storage buckets, and code repositories. This outside-in approach helps uncover shadow IT that internal tools might miss.
Analysis: Once assets are discovered, the EASM tool analyzes them to identify potential security weaknesses. This includes scanning for software vulnerabilities—cross-referencing against authoritative sources like CISA's catalog of vulnerabilities known to be exploited in the wild—as well as checking for open ports, misconfigurations, exposed credentials, and expired certificates.
Prioritization: Not all findings carry the same level of risk. EASM platforms contextualize vulnerabilities by considering factors like exploitability, asset criticality, and potential business impact. This allows security teams to prioritize the most critical threats that pose a genuine risk.
Remediation: The final stage involves providing actionable guidance to help teams fix the identified issues. EASM tools often integrate with ticketing systems and security workflows to assign remediation tasks to the correct owners. The cycle then repeats with continuous monitoring to detect new assets and changes in the attack surface.
A unified platform like Wiz enhances this process by connecting external exposures to the underlying cloud infrastructure. With Wiz's agentless scanning and cloud context, teams can trace an internet-facing vulnerability back to its source in the cloud, enabling faster and more effective remediation. You can learn more about Wiz's unified approach on our cloud security platform page.
The benefits of external attack surface management
Visibility: With its mapping capability and risk prioritization, EASM provides deep visibility into potential threats.
Reduced risks: Security risks are greatly reduced because of EASM's prompt detection, a crucial benefit considering that in the U.S. alone, data compromises in 2024 affected over 1.35 billion individuals.
Compliance: EASM helps the compliance team ensure the alignment of their company's resources with standards and regulations, thanks to the automated discovery feature.
Swift incident response: EASM supports a swift incident response with its threat intelligence integration.
Efficient resource allocation: When prioritizing risks, EASM ensures efficient resource allocation by focusing on criticality and streamlining responses.
EASM’s challenges
Dynamic infrastructure complexity creates the primary challenge for effective EASM implementation. Modern organizations operate across multiple environments—cloud platforms, on-premises systems, and hybrid architectures—each with unique configurations and security requirements.
Shadow IT amplifies the problem. Research shows that companies remain unaware of 64% of their internet-connected assets. This creates significant blind spots where attackers can establish footholds without detection.
Technology evolution outpaces security measures. New cloud services, APIs, and digital assets deploy faster than traditional security tools can discover and protect them, creating persistent gaps in external attack surface visibility. This shadow IT presents a severe security risk and a slew of potential compliance violations.
Moreover, new technologies are constantly emerging, which can elude existing security measures and introduce new vulnerabilities into your system. In order to close vulnerability gaps in this evolving landscape, an ideal EASM solution must be adaptable enough to continuously update your security protocols. Now let’'s turn our attention to other features that robust EASM tools should offer.
Key features for an EASM solution
Choosing the right external attack surface management platform is about more than checking a box—it's about equipping your security team with the visibility, context, and automation needed to stay ahead of attackers. Here are the key features to look for, each reflecting best practices and the Wiz approach to proactive security:
Comprehensive asset discovery: The cornerstone of any EASM solution is its ability to continuously and automatically identify all internet-facing assets – including domains, subdomains, APIs, cloud resources, SaaS applications, and network endpoints. This should extend to both known and unknown (shadow IT) assets, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
Continuous monitoring and real-time alerting: EASM platforms must provide 24/7 surveillance, detecting new exposures, configuration drift, and emerging threats as soon as they appear. Real-time alerts empower security teams to respond before attackers can exploit vulnerabilities.
Automated vulnerability assessment: Effective EASM tools not only find assets, but also scan them for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposed credentials, and compliance gaps – prioritizing issues based on exploitability and business impact.
Risk-based prioritization: Not all risks are created equal. Advanced EASM platforms leverage contextual data—such as asset criticality, threat intelligence, and cloud context – to help teams focus remediation efforts where they matter most.
Seamless integration with cloud and security workflows: An EASM solution should easily connect with cloud environments, ticketing systems, and incident response processes, enabling end-to-end visibility and automated remediation across your tech stack.
Attack surface visualization and reporting: Intuitive dashboards and customizable reports help communicate risk, track progress over time, and support compliance initiatives.
Ultimately, a robust EASM solution provides an attacker’s-eye view of your organization, empowering you to discover, prioritize, and secure every external asset – before adversaries can exploit them. At Wiz, we believe EASM should be unified with cloud security, delivering full context for faster, more effective risk management.
Comparing EASM with other solutions and strategies
EASM vs. internal attack management
Unfortunately, threats don't just come from external sources, making internal attack management a necessity. Monitoring and securing internal assets, systems, and information from threats originating from within an organization's network infrastructure can be complex. Fortunately, there are some well-known best practices and tools that can fortify internal security:
Access controls and user authorizations: By implementing robust access-control policies, organizations can ensure that users have access only to the resources necessary to perform their job. This reduces the risk of unauthorized access and helps prevent threats within the organization's landscape.
Intrusion prevention systems (IPS): IPS solutions monitor network traffic for known attack patterns and automatically block them. With the help of an IPS tool, organizations can prevent unauthorized access attempts, malware infections, and other malicious activities within their network infrastructure.
Network segmentation: By dividing the network into isolated segments with their own security policies, organizations can contain the impact of security incidents. Segmentation helps prevent lateral movement – for example, malware trying to quickly spread or an attacker who managed to access one of the network's segments in order to gain access to the entire system.
Security information and event management (SIEM): SIEM tools collect and analyze security events from various sources such as firewalls, servers, and endpoints. They usually provide near real-time visibility of security incidents, allowing security teams to respond to threats promptly.
EASM and internal attack management differ primarily in their security focus areas. EASM secures internet-facing assets that external attackers can directly access, while internal attack management protects systems within the network perimeter.
EASM scope: Websites, APIs, cloud services, and network infrastructure visible from the public internet.
Internal attack management scope: Employee devices, internal applications, databases, and network segments behind firewalls and access controls.
Both approaches are essential for comprehensive security, but they address different threat vectors and require distinct security strategies and tools.
EASM vs. CAASM
EASM focuses on the internet-facing assets, while cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) takes a broader approach by considering both internal and external assets and their vulnerabilities. Some examples of the assets covered by CAASM are databases, servers, and applications.
CAASM implementation requires extensive integration work. Organizations must connect CAASM platforms to existing security tools, asset management systems, and EASM solutions through custom APIs. This integration process demands coordination between security, IT, and development teams.
The implementation cost is significantly higher due to the technical complexity and resource requirements. Unlike EASM's standardized discovery approach, CAASM requires custom configurations for each internal system and ongoing maintenance as environments evolve.
CAASM's implementation can be expensive, but it does provide some interesting benefits too. The most important advantage is a real-time updated view of your asset inventory. CAASM frees up teams who would otherwise be responsible for manual asset inventory, increasing their productivity and presenting a clear attack surface.
Once more, the main challenge is the aforementioned shadow IT. While EASM performs reconnaissance activities to look for all the external-facing infrastructure, CAASM technologies often map assets by being integrated with them. Consider this example: An employee deploys a simple application and exposes it externally for testing reasons. EASM is more likely to find it by scanning the network, while CAASM won't because it is not integrated with the application.
Finally, one more distinction that also deserves mention is about the vulnerability management process. EASM often automates this process by discovering and prioritizing vulnerabilities by criticality, while CAASM relies more on manual processes.
To sum up, although EASM is much easier to set up, CAASM brings a more holistic response by covering internal and external assets.
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Wiz for Exposure Management
External attack surface management isn’t just a security checkbox—it’s a foundational strategy for protecting your cloud environment. At Wiz, we empower organizations to go beyond by leveraging Wiz Exposure Management, our unified approach to identifying, prioritizing, and remediating all exposures—across both external and internal surfaces. With Wiz, you gain continuous, attacker’s-eye visibility into every internet-facing asset, with critical context from your entire cloud stack, so you can proactively address risk before it’s exploited.
The bottom line: securing your external attack surface is a non-negotiable for business resilience. With Wiz Exposure Management, your security team gets the automation, cloud context, and intelligent prioritization needed to outpace evolving threats and maintain complete confidence in your cloud posture.
Ready to see how Wiz Exposure Management can help you take control of your external attack surface and unify your cloud security strategy? Book a demo today and experience the future of exposure management.
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