Your external attack surface is growing — whether you’re aware of it or not. Cloud migration, IoT, AI, and remote work are all contributing to the rapid expansion of organizations’ external attack surfaces, and many security teams are struggling to keep up.

According to a 2021 report, 69% of organizations admitted they had experienced at least one cyberattack that was initiated through exploiting an unknown or unmanaged internet-facing asset. Risks have only grown since then, with 76% of organizations reporting an attack due to an exposed asset in 2024.

To keep up with this rapid risk expansion, organizations are increasingly relying on External Attack Surface Management (EASM) solutions to identify and monitor their internet-facing assets. But in such a fast-growing industry, it can be hard to know exactly what to look for in a solution. We’ve put together this EASM guide to explain how it could help you, what features to prioritize, and how to futureproof your security posture by choosing a scalable, flexible solution that adapts to evolving technologies and emerging threats.

State of the External Attack Surface Management market in 2025

• In 2022, the global market size for EASM was valued at $545.2 million, with analysts predicting revenue would grow to $930.7 million by 2026. That’s an annual growth rate of 17.5%.
• Looking at the broader Attack Surface Management market, this is projected to grow from $1.43 billion in 2024 to $9.19 billion by 2032 — a compound annual growth rate of 30.4%.
• High-risk sectors like finance, government, and technology face stricter compliance requirements and greater exposure to threats, so it’s no surprise to see them as leading adopters of EASM.
• North America is currently leading in EASM adoption, with Europe and the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) following close behind.

What is External Attack Surface Management and why does it matter?

As organizations rapidly embrace digital transformation, their attack surfaces are expanding at an unprecedented pace. Decentralized IT ecosystems — driven by rapid cloud adoption, increased remote work, continuous deployment, and third-party integrations — create blind spots like unknown subdomains, unsecured APIs, and abandoned cloud assets. Opportunistic threat actors are exploiting these gaps, taking advantage of weaknesses more rapidly than traditional defenses can respond.

To address these growing challenges, External Attack Surface Management (EASM) has emerged as a critical component of modern cybersecurity. EASM solutions provide continuous visibility into an organization’s internet-facing assets — their external attack surface — so security teams can identify exposures and prioritize remediation before attackers strike.

By automating discovery, monitoring, and risk assessment, EASM can help you stay ahead of evolving threats and maintain control over your rapidly expanding digital perimeter.

Most common external attack surface vulnerabilities

The more internet-facing assets you have, the greater your risk of creating weak points that threat actors can exploit. There are many possible vulnerabilities in an external attack surface, with some of the most common including:

• Unpatched software
• Misconfigured access controls
• Open ports and services
• Weak network perimeters
• Social engineering
• Insecure APIs
• Third-party dependencies

These vulnerabilities can often go unnoticed due to the dynamic nature of modern IT environments and the lack of continuous visibility. Without proactive monitoring and management, even a single overlooked asset can become the entry point for a serious breach.

Analyst insights into EASM

• Gartner: Initially highlighted as an “essential new technology” in a 2021 report, Gartner’s 2023 Invest Implications Report pointed to a consolidating EASM market. Providers are now expanding EASM to cover a broader range of cyber-physical systems, including operational technology (OT) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which traditionally haven’t been monitored by IT security.
• Forrester: In 2024, Forrester noted that EASM is evolving into a capability integrated across various security products. Notably, threat intelligence providers are leveraging EASM to offer a more comprehensive external view, including not only external assets but also brand impersonations, executive monitoring, and third-party/supply chain risk.
• KuppingerCole: KuppingerCole’s 2025 Leadership Compass Report for Attack Surface Management emphasizes that a proactive EASM approach is crucial due to rapidly expanding attack surfaces. This involves continuous discovery, monitoring, risk assessment, threat intelligence, third-party risk, and digital risk protection.
  • According to KuppingerCole, key EASM capabilities include integration with ITSM and SOAR tools, automated remediation, and real-time threat prioritization.

Outpost24 named an Overall Leader in 2025 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass report

The 2025 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass Report for Attack Surface Management named Outpost24 as an Overall Leader in the ASM market. Some of the key features of the Outpost24 EASM platform highlighted by KuppingerCole include:

• Detects websites and applications that are without GDPR-compliant cookie consent practices
• Strong M&A risk analysis capabilities
• Easy licensing which includes unlimited assets and users per organization
• Proprietary risk-scoring framework
• Supported MITRE ATT&CK mapping

Interested to find out how Outpost24’s EASM solution could work for your organization? Try it for free today.

How EASM solutions can help: Top use cases for EASM

EASM is designed to address the challenge of staying on top of external attack surface vulnerabilities, providing continuous insight into all internet-facing vulnerabilities.

Here are some of the top use cases where EASM delivers the most value:

• Visibility over all external assets: EASM tools automatically detect and monitor all your organization’s internet-facing assets, providing you with a comprehensive overview of your external attack surface.
• Discovering unknowns: EASM helps uncover shadow IT, orphaned domains, forgotten cloud instances, and other unmanaged assets that may be invisible to internal teams but exposed to attackers.
• Identifying and prioritizing risks: By correlating asset data with threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and business context, EASM allows security teams to focus on the most critical issues first.
• Brand protection: EASM can monitor the health of your brand, detecting external threats such as stolen credentials on the dark web and cybersquatting.
• Reducing manual effort: Through automated discovery, risk scoring, and alerting, EASM significantly reduces the need for time-consuming manual asset inventories and vulnerability checks.
• Compliance with regulations: EASM helps you identify where your internet-facing assets are located globally and detect unauthorized tracking cookies on your websites, helping you comply with GDPR regulations.

Top features to look for in an EASM solution

With such rapid growth in the EASM market, driven by the continuous expansion of the modern attack surface, it can be difficult to know exactly what you should be looking for in an EASM solution. Here’s a roundup of the top features any best-of-breed EASM solution should offer:

• Comprehensive external asset discovery: The first step to securing your external attack surface is knowing exactly what it includes. A top EASM solution should provide automatic, comprehensive discovery of all internet-facing assets, including IP addresses, domains and subdomains, shadow IT resources, and more.
• Continuous, automated monitoring and scanning: External threats are constantly growing and shifting, which makes point-in-time assessments risky. Your EASM solution should automatically perform continuous discovery and active scanning to proactively identify and mitigate threats.
• Risk scoring and prioritization: The risk level of vulnerabilities can vary significantly, and your EASM solution should take this into account. Ideally, it should synthesize asset criticality, exposure level, and real-time threat intelligence into a dynamic risk score that enables you to prioritize and target risks effectively.
• Attack path visualization and relationship mapping: It’s key to understand how your assets interconnect and how an attacker could move from one to another. That’s why one of the top EASM features to look out for is the ability to automatically build an asset graph demonstrating relationships between all your external assets.
• Alerting and automated remediation workflows: Your EASM tool should provide real-time alerts that integrate into your existing workflows, as well as automate the next steps for a smooth process.
• SIEM/ITSM integrations: Flexibility is essential. Your EASM solution should offer a robust API to integrate asset data, risk scores, and alerts into tools like SIEMs, CMDBs, or custom dashboards.
• Threat intelligence integration: Your EASM should ingest threat feeds to provide real-world context and proactively highlight assets affected by emerging threats. Integration with sources like abuse indices, phishing registries, and dark web monitoring helps detect credential leaks and targeted attacks on your brand.

Futureproofing EASM

As external attack surfaces continue to grow and the threat landscape evolves, EASM solutions need to adapt alongside them. Selecting an EASM platform that can adapt to these ongoing changes is critical for long-term security efficacy.

Here’s what to look for in an EASM platform that can evolve with the threat landscape and continue delivering value over time.

AI-driven insights and automation

The integration of AI and machine learning into EASM platforms is rapidly transforming how we discover, analyze, and remediate external attack surfaces. AI can automatically organize huge amounts of data and prioritize vulnerabilities based on contextual risk, saving time and allowing security teams to respond to threats more rapidly.

For example, the Digital Risk Protection modules within Outpost24’s EASM platform offer AI-enhanced summaries, helping to break down complex information into digestible snippets. This saves security teams the time and effort of deep diving into individual items, letting AI do the heavy lifting.

Proactive threat intelligence integration

Proactive threat intelligence integration is essential to building a futureproof EASM solution. By continuously ingesting both commercial and open-source threat feeds, an EASM can contextualize real-time developments in the threat landscape and correlate them with an organization’s digital presence.

Outpost24’s CompassDRP goes beyond traditional EASM, combining it with threat-intelligence powered Digital Risk Protection (DRP) modules to automatically monitor risk across an organization’s full digital footprint. These four key DRP elements cover dark web monitoring, social media risk management, data leakage, and leaked credentials monitoring — all powered by our dedicated in-house threat intelligence team, KrakenLabs.

Interested in finding out how CompassDRP could help protect your organization from threats? Request a free demo.

Outpost24’s EASM solution

Outpost24’s EASM platform offers a comprehensive view of your growing attack surface, combining powerful External Attack Surface Management with proactive threat intelligence to identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Sign up for a free trial today and experience the full power of EASM to transform your security posture.

Outpost24 EASM key features

• Comprehensive eternal asset discovery: Outpost24’s solution automatically maps and inventories known and unknown internet-facing assets using AI-powered domain discovery, DNS crawling, certificate transparency logs, and other advanced reconnaissance techniques.
• Continuous, automated monitoring and scanning: Our platform runs 24×7 automated monitoring and active scanning (open ports, software versions, misconfigurations), with manual rescan capability to pick up changes in real time.
• Risk scoring and prioritization engine: Computes dynamic risk scores at both the asset and “observation” level (vulnerability, misconfiguration), correlating CVSS, exploitability, asset criticality, and business context into a visual prioritization dashboard.
• Attack path visualization and relationship mapping: AI-driven analysis modules automatically build and prioritize multi-step attack paths across your external asset graph — revealing how an attacker could pivot from one exposed resource to another.
• Threat intelligence integration: Integrated Digital Risk Protection modules use commercial and open-source threat feeds (including leaked credentials, social media, data leakage, and dark-web chatter) to enrich asset findings and reduce false positives.
• Alerting and automated remediation workflows: Fully configurable alert rules trigger real-time notifications into Jira, ServiceNow, SOAR or Slack, and can automatically create tickets or kick off remediation playbooks to close security gaps.
• SIEM/ITSM integrations: A wide range of out-of-the-box integrations (Jira, ITSM, SOAR, CAASM) plus a REST API and SDKs let you synchronize asset inventories, risk scores and remediation status bidirectionally with your SIEM, CMDB or custom tooling.
• Simple onboarding with no on-premises installation: Our EASM solution is cloud-based and doesn’t require any software or agent installation. All we need is basic information like your company name and primary domains to get started.

Find out how Outpost24’s EASM solution could boost your organization’s cyber resilience. Sign up for a free attack surface analysis today.