In modern cybersecurity, it’s not just about what’s inside your network—it’s about what’s exposed to the outside world. With the proliferation of cloud services, third-party integrations, and remote work setups, your organization’s external attack surface has grown exponentially. Traditional security measures often struggle to keep up with this sprawl, leaving potential vulnerabilities unchecked.

Enter External Attack Surface Management (EASM). EASM solutions are designed to give you a bird’s-eye view of your external-facing assets, helping you identify and mitigate risks before they become full-blown threats. External Attack Surface Management (EASM) can help organizations all over the world with their online attack surface visibility, inventory, monitoring and analysis. If you’re an IT professional considering an EASM solution, here are eight compelling reasons why it should be at the top of your to-do list.

1. Asset discovery and inventory

One of the prime values of External Attack Surface Management is the automatic discovery and inventory of all your company’s online assets. Running continuously, an EASM solution will keep a record of the known, unknown and unmanaged IT assets out there. The central internet-facing assets inventory that is built up, will automatically stay up to date. It will give you a real-time status of the external attack surface and warn you when new assets and issues arise. What you know, you can protect.

In the first phase of the Cyber Kill Chain, bad actors perform reconnaissance on organizations to select their victims. They will try to find everything they can on the company, including all online exposed assets. By mapping and knowing your attack surface before cybercriminals do, you can prevent cyberattacks by reducing your online exposure and removing assets without business justification, fixing misconfigurations, remediating security issues and risks and cleaning up your attack surface to make it as lean and agile as possible. And thus less attractive for cyber criminals to break into.

Domain discovery is a useful EASM feature that makes sure your horizontal attack surface scope is continuously completed and keeps track of possible look-a-like domains. As an inventory of assets connected to the internet is extremely important, but it needs to stay up to date. An EASM platform automatically and continuously monitors your organization’s discovered attack surface for changes. So you’re the first to know when your attack surface changes or problems, vulnerabilities or misconfigurations emerge.

2. Attack surface scoring & reporting

EASM solutions often offer an attack surface score. This is a rating of the company’s cybersecurity posture, indicating how well the attack surface is managed at a certain point in time and how it improves going forward.

Attack surface scoring can help your company improve its external security posture and be used in reporting to peers and management. EASM solutions rate the attack surface across the entire scope, on asset level and on observations (attack surface issues). Six cybersecurity dimensions are taken into account, such as vulnerabilities, configuration, exposed services, encryption, reputation, and hygiene. Attack surface scoring helps organizations report to peers, by indicating how well the attack surface is managed at a certain point in time and how it improves going forward.

For larger organizations, it can be interesting to logically divide the external attack surface into subscopes. These subscopes can be based on subsidiaries, brands, locations, logical business lines, etc. and are an easy way to group, structure, and filter the attack surface.

Next to the attack surface score, companies use the visual representations, trendlines and analysis in the dashboard in their reporting. Additionally, splitting the findings in the platform up in different subscopes for each of your brands or subdivisions, provides a specific report for every part of the organization.

Furthermore, the Sweepatic Platform Dashboard provides a visual overview of your attack surface and serves as an efficient reporting tool. All sections in the platform offer exports and a report can be generated to summarize the current attack surface posture. Additionally, the platform offers a fully-documented API and integrations.

3. Brand protection

Outpost24’s Sweepatic platform uses various techniques to monitor the health of your organization’s brand(s). With our automated cybersquatting or look-alike domain detection and suspicious indicators, EASM offers an early-warning system that can prompt your actions before a bad actor takes advantage.

The goal of bad actors registering copycat domains is to either cause brand reputation damage or collect sensitive information through a phishing campaign from unaware visitors. Cybersquatting domain candidates can be automatically discovered and rated on suspiciousness based on various techniques, like TLD Swap, NS Match, and Website Links.

A specific example of a method used to find cybersquatting domains is parked domains. A parked domain indicates that a domain candidate is available for purchase from a registrar. These parked candidate domains are important to keep an eye on, since they can be acquired and misused by a bad actor. You can either proactively purchase the domain yourself or monitor it further (for example to see who buys it).

EASM lets you add keywords – like brand, product or company names – to your scope. These keywords boost the platform to discover more domains, subdomains, and similar websites that either belong to your company or can pose a domain squatting threat.

The domain finds based on these keywords are displayed in the Domain Discovery section of our EASM platform and rated according to the likelihood that they belong to your company and the degree of suspiciousness.

4. Encryption certificate monitoring

With EASM, your encryption and certificate chains are monitored continuously. It will warn you of websites and online portals without a valid SSL certificate, certificates that are (about to be) expired, weak or deprecated TLS protocols. Proper encryption prevents data leakage and man-in-the-middle attacks. EASM helps you keep a close eye on all your websites and their SSL certificates, including their expiry dates, the certificate chain, TLS protocols and issuers. In that way, you can continuously monitor against your encryption standard and be alerted when there is any violation. Proper encryption prevents data leakage and man-in-the-middle attacks.

The Certificates module in the Sweepatic Platform keeps a close eye on all your websites and their SSL certificates, including their expiry dates, the certificate chain, TLS protocols and issuers. In that way, you can continuously monitor against your encryption standard and be alerted when there is any violation. Encryption is also one of the six cybersecurity dimensions consulted to score the attack surface. This means that valid SSL certificates contribute to a better score overall on your attack surface and thus a better cybersecurity posture.

5. GDPR compliance

A fifth business use case for EASM, is compliancy with the General Data Protection Regulation. EASM can help you know where all your internet-facing assets are physically residing in the world. Find hosts in your external perimeter that are deployed in a country you have no relation with. Based on a list of marketing and analytics (i.e. tracking) cookies, Sweepatic can detect cookies that are set before (or without any) user consent is given. This enables the platform to track cookie consent violations on your websites. This is a violation of the EU GDPR regulation and local privacy authorities are handing out fines for violations. Be informed and avoid a breach or potential GDPR fine.

6. Mergers & acquisitions

With EASM, you not only get automatic visibility on your organization’s own attack surface, but also that of (to be) acquired companies. Without any form of installation, relying on OSINT and public accessible information, EASM by Outpost24 provides you with an instant overview of possible vulnerable points, misconfigurations, the overall attack surface score, and much more.

An intelligent list of all primary domains, subdomains, websites, SSL certificates, hosts, technologies and other IT assets is always accessible in the automatically updated and centralized asset inventories in the Sweepatic Platform. The subscope functionality allows you to filter the data based on specific subsidiaries.

Automatically and continuously discovering, mapping, and monitoring all internet-facing assets associated to the company, allows you to keep an eye on the changing and expanding attack surface at all times. You can then evaluate weak points and remediate them. Attack Surface Scoring in the platform indicate the state of the cybersecurity posture of the company. This can help in evaluating before a merger or acquisition.

7. Find shadow IT

Leveraging continuous internet-facing assets discovery, EASM finds unknown and unmanaged IT assets. This includes Shadow IT, which you will be made aware of so you can take the appropriate actions.

Due to digital transformation, the attack surface of organizations grows steadily. The number of internet-facing assets, like websites, subdomains, hosts, technologies and cloud resources, increases at a rapid pace. The same goes for shadow IT – IT assets that escape the knowledge or attention of the central IT department. Shadow IT consumes budget unnecessarily and increases security risks, that might not be tracked nor managed.

With the continuous internet-facing assets discovery, EASM can help find shadow IT, making you aware of unknown and/or unmanaged assets and taking actions accordingly. Attack surface management fuels the reduction of shadow IT assets. Platform notifications from Sweepatic  will keep you up to date with new assets popping up in your attack surface. That way, you are always informed when a possible Shadow IT asset was about to be created – another compelling reason to implement EASM.

8. Vulnerability & misconfiguration assessment

All the internet-facing assets discovered in as EASM platform are analyzed for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Notifications will alert you of any issues that you (urgently) need to review. This allows organizations to manage their attack surface accordingly and start the remediation process.

All observations produced by the Sweepatic Platform are ranked by criticality, here are some examples:

• Light vulnerability assessment: The technologies used by your internet-facing assets are checked for known vulnerabilities and prioritized according to -among others- their CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) score.
• Exposed services: Do you have any open ports exposed that should not be directly discoverable by outsiders?
• Encryption certificate monitoring: EASM checks all web applications for SSL certificates, their validity and expiration date, and much more.
• Cookie consent violations: Is your cookie consent mechanism rightly configured on your websites? 
• Reputation checks: Do your mail servers appear on blocklists?

This generates a specific urgency against a list of prioritized actions to consider in your attack surface. Detected vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are also reflected in the attack surface score.

Assess your attack surface today

Outpost24’s EASM solution, Sweepatic, discovers and inventories all internet-facing assets connected to your organization. This includes unknown and unmanaged IT assets that you get visibility on and that will automatically stay up to date in the central internet-facing assets inventory. An EASM platform can provide real-time status of the attack surface, including visual representations and trends. Furthermore, notifications are sent when a new asset discovery or attack surface change occurs leading to prioritized observations you (urgently) need to take a look at.

Our simple onboarding process doesn’t need any software or agent installation – the platform is cloud-based and easily accessible through a secure login via your internet browser. We only need basic information like your company name and primary domains to get started. Book your free attack surface analysis today.