What is External Attack Surface Management (EASM)?

For organizations, attack surface management means proactively addressing the cyber threats, vulnerabilities, and exposures that adversaries can use to gain unauthorized access to their systems and attack their brand and customers.

Attack surface management is a predominant concern for security teams and their senior leadership, who must have a comprehensive view of their overall digital exposures and deep insight into threats targeting them to make strategic decisions safely and effectively.

Attack surfaces are an organization's entire digital presence, which can be massive and encompass hundreds of thousands of assets and millions of signals across the internet, cloud, and mobile app ecosystem. Today's attack surfaces are dynamic and global in scale—COVID-19 accelerated the decentralized work environment, cloud workloads have become critical to modern IT, and SaaS platforms play an increasing role in the enterprise. With each organization's security perimeter bleeding more and more into the internet, defending the extended enterprise is a global-scale challenge.