External attack surfaces have never been more sprawling, or more vulnerable. As organizations increasingly rely on dynamic, cloud-based infrastructures, and third-party services, digital footprints are only going to carry on growing. So, it’s no surprise many are turning towards External Attack Surface Management (EASM) tools for more visibility into both known and unknown assets. But what should you be looking for in a solution? 

We’ll walk through the EASM top features any best-of-breed solution should offer. These seven critical capabilities separate a reactive scanner from a proactive threat-hunting platform. 

Top seven EASM features to look for 

Whether you’re kicking off your first EASM evaluation or looking to upgrade an existing toolset, understanding these core capabilities is essential. From discovering shadow IT and visualizing multi-step attack paths to automating remediation and integrating with your SIEM/ITSM stack, each feature plays a pivotal role in turning raw asset data into actionable, risk-driven intelligence.  

1. Comprehensive external asset discovery

Locking down your perimeter starts with knowing exactly what comprises it, with no surprises. Before your security team can protect anything, they have to know what’s out there. A robust EASM solution should automatically discover all internet-facing assets: 

• IP addresses 
• Domain names and subdomains 
• Cloud instances 
• Third-party services 
• Shadow IT resources 
• Forgotten dev servers, staging environments, or abandoned cloud buckets 

The tool must crawl DNS records, certificate transparency logs, and passive DNS data to map out your full external footprint and avoid blind spots. Ideally, your tool will provide up-to-date asset inventory that tags assets by business unit, environment, and risk profile. That way, when you roll out a new application or spin up a test environment, the system picks it up without manual input.  

2. Continuous, automated monitoring and scanning

It’s risky to rely on point-in-time assessments. External threats evolve by the minute, so your EASM tool needs to perform continuous discovery and active scanning without you having to kick off jobs manually. It should run periodic vulnerability scans (checking for open ports, outdated software, misconfigurations) as well as passive monitoring to pick up certificate changes or abandoned services. 

Automated scheduling with customizable frequency per asset group keeps scanning load balanced and avoids throttling or blacklisting. Crucially, it needs to alert you instantly when a new vulnerability appears or a misconfiguration crops up on a high-risk asset. This continuous feedback loop is your early warning system, giving you the runway to remediate before attackers can exploit any gaps in your external defense. 

3. Risk scoring and prioritization

Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. You need a solution that synthesizes asset criticality, exposure level, and real-time threat intelligence into a dynamic risk score. External web servers hosting customer data take top priority, while legacy subdomains with no traffic may sit lower in the queue. The tool should correlate CVSS metrics, exploit availability, and known attack trends to adjust scores on the fly.  

It should also factor in business context. For example, whether a service handles PII, drives revenue, or supports a regulatory requirement. That way, your team can focus remediation efforts on the handful of high-risk issues that matter most, rather than chasing dozens of low-impact findings. A clear, customizable dashboard that sorts findings by risk score will make life much easier for your security team.  

4. Attack path visualization and relationship mapping

Understanding how assets interconnect and how an attacker could pivot from one to another is crucial. Among the EASM top features to prioritize is the ability to automatically build an asset graph that shows relationships between domains, subdomains, IPs, cloud instances, third-party integrations, and even partner connections. You want to see multi-step attack paths, like a vulnerable dev server exposing credentials that then give access to a production database. 

Interactive visual maps should let you click into nodes, inspect configurations, and simulate ‘what-if’ scenarios. This helps identify choke points where a single misconfiguration could cascade into a serious breach. It also drives more strategic hardening: if you know that a particular jump in the graph is high risk, you can segment or firewall it immediately.  

5. Alerting and automated remediation workflows

You need real-time alerts that integrate seamlessly into your existing workflows, whether that’s Jira, ServiceNow, or a Slack channel. The EASM tool should support customizable alert rules: trigger on new critical vulnerabilities, unexpected certificate changes, or the appearance of a high-risk subdomain.  

Beyond just notifying, the platform should automate the next steps: create tickets, assign owners, even kick off scripts to revoke exposed credentials or apply firewall rules. Playbook templates for common scenarios help you onboard new team members quickly and ensure consistency. You also need audit trails and reporting to demonstrate remediation progress to auditors and executives. An EASM that closes the loop from detection to fix not only speeds up response times, but also reduces the risk of things slipping through the cracks. 

6. SIEM/ITSM integrations

Flexibility is non-negotiable. Your EASM should expose a rich API so you can pull asset inventories, vulnerability findings, and risk scores into your SIEM, CMDB, or custom dashboards. You should be able to write adapters that sync data into ServiceNow or Splunk, or feed alerts into your SOAR engine. Bi-directional integrations allow you to mark findings as ‘in progress’ or ‘resolved’ based on external ticket status, preventing duplicate work and ensuring a single source of truth.  

7. Threat intelligence integration

Your EASM should ingest threat feeds (both commercial and open source) to contextualize what’s happening in the wild. If a new zero-day exploit against your web server stack emerges, or if a malware campaign targets a service you expose, the system needs to highlight affected assets proactively. Integration with abuse indices, phishing registries, and dark-web monitoring can alert you to credential leaks or targeted campaigns against your brand. 

For example, Outpost24’s EASM solution is integrated with four digital risk protection (DRP) modules powered by threat intelligence: 

• Credentials: Finds actionable intelligence around leaked, stolen, and sold user credentials. We locate them in real time on the open, deep, and dark web, along with information about relevant malware used to steal the information. Outpost24’s sinkholes, honeypots, crawlers, and sensors are continuously searching for your stolen credentials from leaks, on forums, and in real-time from targeted malware.  This helps eliminate serious attack vectors and fraudulent actions in minutes rather than weeks or months. 
• Dark Web: Boosts your awareness of what’s going on in the underground. Get visibility over malicious activities targeting your organization and proactively prevent future attacks. Gain an advantage by putting an eye on the enemy camp: become better informed about criminals targeting your organization; proactively prepare countermeasures. 
• Social Media: Monitors and checks your organization’s digital footprint across Web 2.0 repositories, including blogs, forums, websites, and social networks. Find websites not authorized to use your brands and assets claiming partnership affiliation assets and more, so you can take proactive steps to shut them down. 
• Data Leakage: Discovers if your organization’s sensitive documents and source code has been leaked on the internet, deep web or P2P networks, intentionally or not, such as with shared internal documents with poorly secured file sharing providers. 

Outpost24’s EASM solution 

Ready to turn your external attack surface into a strategic advantage? Experience the power of Outpost24’s EASM platform yourself – sign up for a free trial today and see how continuous discovery, risk-driven prioritization, and seamless automation can transform your security posture. Secure your perimeter proactively with Outpost24. Map your attack surface for free today.  

Outpost24 EASM: Top 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 DRP 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.

See how Outpost24’s EASM solution could fit in with your organization. Try for free today.