What is attack surface management?
Attack Surface Management (ASM) is the outside-in component of an exposure management program. Its purpose is simple: show you everything attackers can see from the public internet.
That includes internet-reachable domains, IPs, APIs, cloud services, storage endpoints, and any other asset your organization unintentionally exposes. In cloud environments, this often uncovers things security teams didn’t know existed — dev systems, temporary environments, shadow cloud accounts, legacy applications, and misconfigured resources that drifted open.
ASM works from the attacker’s perspective. It performs external discovery and exposure validation to answer foundational questions like:
What assets do we have on the internet?
Are any of them misconfigured or unintentionally exposed?
Which of these are unknown or unmanaged?
Traditional ASM tools were built around one goal: visibility. They identify what’s exposed to the internet, but their view typically ends there. They don’t understand how those exposures behave inside your environment, what they connect to, or how they translate into actual risk.
Modern ASM has evolved far beyond that limited model. Discovery is just the starting point. To understand whether an exposure matters, ASM must also determine:
Whether the exposed asset is actually reachable from the public internet
Whether it has vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that make exploitation realistic
What identities, permissions, and privileges it inherits if compromised
What internal systems or sensitive data it can reach
Who owns the asset and can remediate it
This shift transforms ASM from a list of public endpoints into a meaningful signal about which exposures sit on real attack paths.
That’s why modern security teams treat ASM not as a narrow discovery tool but as a core component of a broader exposure management program. Exposure Management incorporates ASM’s outside-in visibility and enriches it with internal context — identity, data, configuration, network reachability, and vulnerability information — to understand true exploitability and business impact.
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What is exposure management?
Exposure Management is the umbrella discipline that brings together every factor that determines whether an issue is actually exploitable — not just what’s exposed externally, but what’s vulnerable, over-permissive, misconfigured, or connected to sensitive data inside your environment.
Where ASM focuses on what’s visible from the outside, Exposure Management asks the deeper question:
“Which issues represent real attack paths in our environment?”
To answer that, Exposure Management unifies signals from across your stack:
External exposures (ASM)
Vulnerabilities and misconfigurations (UVM + config scanning)
Identity and permission risks (overprivileged roles, toxic combinations)
Data sensitivity (PII, secrets, business-critical assets)
Network reachability and lateral movement paths
Runtime behavior and drift
Code and supply chain risks (pre-deployment)
Instead of generating separate lists of findings, Exposure Management correlates all of these dimensions to surface true risk — the small percentage of issues that form viable attack paths attackers could actually use.
Exposure management vs. attack surface management: Core differences
Exposure Management and Attack Surface Management aren’t peer concepts — one is the full program, and the other is a single component inside it.
ASM answers:
👉 “What do we have exposed to the internet?”
Exposure Management answers:
👉 “Which exposures, vulnerabilities, identities, and data actually create real attack paths in our environment?”
Breadth vs. depth
ASM focuses only on external-facing assets — the part attackers can see from the outside.
Exposure Management examines your entire environment: cloud, SaaS, identity, data, containers, code, and even on-prem systems.
Discovery vs. prioritization
ASM builds an inventory of internet-facing assets.
Exposure Management correlates exposures with vulnerabilities, permissions, and data sensitivity to prioritize what truly matters.
Outside-in vs. unified context
ASM scans from the outside using DNS records, certificates, ports, and public internet recon.
Exposure Management uses deep, inside-out context from cloud APIs, IAM graphs, runtime signals, CI/CD metadata, and data classification.
Findings vs. attack paths
ASM shows what’s reachable.
Exposure Management shows what’s exploitable — the combination of exposure + vulnerability + identity + data that forms a path an attacker could actually use.
How Wiz unifies exposure management and ASM
Most organizations start with ASM because external visibility is an urgent, tangible problem: you can’t protect what you don’t know exists. But once you have that visibility, the harder question immediately follows:
“Which of these exposures actually matter?”
That’s where Wiz’s exposure-centric approach changes the game.
Wiz brings ASM together with vulnerability analysis, identity and permission context, data sensitivity, network reachability, and code-level insights inside a single Security Graph. Instead of juggling separate tools, teams get one model that shows:
Every internet-exposed asset across cloud and hybrid environments
What’s sitting behind those exposures — vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, toxic privilege combinations
Whether the asset reaches sensitive data or critical systems
Who owns it and how to route remediation
The result isn’t just “more visibility.” It’s clarity. ASM findings stop being flat lists and turn into attack paths you can fix in the right order, with the right owners, and with measurable reduction in risk.
Wiz treats ASM as a foundational signal within a broader Exposure Management program — the program that helps you understand not only what’s exposed, but what’s actually exploitable in your environment.
If you want to see what that unified view looks like in your own environment, schedule a demo today.
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