What Is External Attack Surface Management (EASM)?

External attack surface management (EASM) is the practice of identifying potential vulnerabilities and security gaps in an organization’s public-facing digital attack surface. EASM works to identify corporate IT assets that are publicly accessible and any vulnerabilities that might exist within them. This can be accomplished via a combination of penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, and automated scanning.

External Attack Surface Assessment 2024 Cyber Security Report

What Is External Attack Surface Management (EASM)?

How Does it Work?

EASM tools regularly and automatically monitor an organization’s external attack surface, which includes all corporate assets accessible from the public Internet. After it has identified a public-facing asset, the tool will inspect it for configuration errors, unpatched vulnerabilities, and other potential security gaps. These potential attack vectors will be prioritized and reported to an organization’s security team, enabling them to address the potential security risks before they can be exploited by an attacker.

Why is External Attack Surface Management (EASM) Important?

EASM is important because an organization’s external digital attack surface is a primary target for cyberattacks. Cybercriminals looking for means of gaining access to an organization’s environment will scan its external attack surface to identify vulnerabilities that they can exploit. EASM helps to identify and close the security gaps that these attackers are most likely to identify and target. As a result, it reduces an organization’s risk of being the target of a cyberattack.

Benefits of EASM

EASM can be used for various purposes that provide significant benefits to the organization, including:

  • Asset Discovery: An organization can’t secure IT assets that it doesn’t know exists. EASM solutions provide automated discovery and mapping of an organization’s external attack surface, providing much-needed security visibility.
  • Vulnerability Discovery: EASM solutions are designed to identify potential vulnerabilities in an organization’s public-facing digital attack surface. By doing so, they provide the organization with the ability to close these security gaps.
  • Risk Prioritization: Many organizations have more potential vulnerabilities than they can effectively remediate. EASM provides valuable context and risk prioritization, enabling the organization to address the most significant and potentially impactful vulnerabilities first.
  • Enhanced Remediation: Attempted remediation may not always be successful, leaving the organization vulnerable to attack. EASM validates the effectiveness of remediation actions, ensuring that they truly reduce the organization’s vulnerability to cyberattacks.
  • Governance and Compliance: Managing risk to sensitive data is vital to ensuring compliance with various regulations. EASM provides the visibility necessary to identify and close attack vectors that could be used in a data breach.
  • Third-Party Risk Management: An organization’s IT systems may be connected to those of subsidiaries, vendors, partners, and more. EASM can provide insight into these relationships and the potential security risks that they pose to the organization.

Internal vs. External Attack Surface Management

An organization’s external digital attack surface is the set of IT assets that are accessible from the public Internet. An attacker starting from outside the organization’s environment can only see and target these assets, and EASM is designed to decrease their vulnerability to exploitation.

However, someone inside the organization’s perimeter has much broader access to corporate IT systems that are invisible and inaccessible from outside. Internal attack surface management (IASM) attempts to identify and address those vulnerabilities that an internal threat could use to move laterally through the corporate network and gain the access and privileges required to achieve their objective.

Main Challenges Around External Attack Surface Management

If an organization can fully lock down its external attack surface, its cybersecurity risk decreases significantly. However, companies face various challenges that make this more difficult to accomplish, including:

  • Distributed IT Environments: With the growth of cloud computing and remote work, corporate IT environments are becoming increasingly distributed. As a result, the boundary between public and private space is more difficult to define, complicating external attack surface management.
  • Shadow IT: Shadow IT is when employees use unapproved and unmanaged software and tools, a practice that has become easier and more common with the growth of Software as a Service (SaaS) tools and other cloud services. These unmanaged tools make up part of an organization’s external attack surface; however, the security team may be unaware of their existence and unable to properly secure them.
  • Security Complexity: Companies face a wide variety of cybersecurity threats and use various point security products to manage these risks. However, the more solutions that an organization has in place, the more difficult they are to manage and the larger the volume of data that security teams need to analyze and act upon.

EASM with Check Point IGS

EASM is a critical component of an organization’s cybersecurity strategy, enabling the business to identify and close security gaps before they can be exploited by an attacker. However, the scope of the task and the wide range of potential vulnerabilities make having the right tools and expertise vital for EASM’s success.

Check Point’s Infinity Global Services (IGS) offers managed External Attack Surface Assessments as part of its portfolio of security services. To learn how to improve visibility into your organization’s digital attack surface and work toward closing significant security gaps, check out Check Point’s EASM capabilities.

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