Choosing the Right Attack Surface Visibility Software

If you’re in the market for a cyber attack surface visibility tool, this post outlines the top features and capabilities that will maximize the returns of your new cyber investment.

Learn how UpGuard streamlines attack surface management >

What is attack surface visibility?

Attack surface visibility refers to the continuous discovery and mapping of all digital assets that an attacker could potentially target. It includes assets that are both external (internet-facing) and internal (within the network).

The primary goal of this practice is to reduce your organization's exposure to cyber threats proactively. A comprehensive view of your attack surface enables you to identify and fix security vulnerabilities, monitor for unauthorized or forgotten assets (a problem known as shadow IT), and maintain compliance with industry regulations.

This approach extends beyond traditional vulnerability scans, which only examine known, internal systems. It also covers a wide range of assets, including domains, IP addresses, APIs, cloud infrastructure, IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and even third-party vendors and their connected systems.

Why attack surface visibility is critical for modern cybersecurity

An organization's attack surface is constantly growing and changing in today’s interconnected threat landscape. Without proper visibility, this expanding surface creates new opportunities for attackers and new risks for the business. Attack surface visibility is critical for modern cybersecurity for several key reasons:

• Preventing shadow IT risks: Attack surface management tools continuously monitor and identify unauthorized or unmanaged assets, a common issue known as "shadow IT". These devices, applications, or cloud services, which are often overlooked by security teams, can create significant security gaps and are a major cause of data breaches.
• Improving compliance posture: A visibility tool can help you achieve the most comprehensive attack surface coverage by addressing all possible data breach entry points. Continuous monitoring provides the real-time data needed to meet compliance requirements and gives an objective, unbiased quantification of an organization’s security posture through a security rating.
• Reducing breach likelihood: The more successful a cybersecurity program is, the more likely it is to defend against a greater scope of cyber threats through greater attack surface visibility. By knowing your entire attack surface, you can identify and remediate security risks and potential attack vectors faster than attackers can find and exploit them.
• Integration with modern frameworks: Attack surface visibility is a foundational element of contemporary security frameworks, such as zero-trust, which operates on the principle of "never trust, always verify." It is also a key component of Continuous Monitoring, as it provides the continuous awareness of digital assets and emerging risks that traditional point-in-time assessments often miss.

Learn more with our attack surface management guide >

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Key practices to achieve visibility

A great attack surface visibility tool is only one part of the equation—you also need to establish a set of continuous practices to get the most out of it. By building these habits, you can ensure your organization has a comprehensive, real-time understanding of its digital footprint.

Asset discovery and classification

To achieve the most comprehensive attack surface coverage, you must address all possible data breach entry points, from on-premise to cloud-based assets. To accomplish this, utilize automated tools to catalog domains, IP addresses, and cloud assets. Conventional attack surface management tools often focus solely on identifying cyber risks that impact external-facing assets. For optimal data breach protection, security teams must expand their visibility into attack vectors to encompass the entire organization’s attack surface. You also need to classify assets based on their criticality to the business to prioritize remediation efforts.

For optimal data breach protection, security teams must expand their visibility of attack vectors to encompass the entire organization’s attack surface, both internal and external. This approach is also known as Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM), and it involves the continuous monitoring of internal and external endpoints and ecosystems, including:

• APIs and tool integrations
• Firewalls
• Web applications
• IoT devices
• Internet-facing assets
• SaaS products
• Mobile apps
• Access controls
• Service providers
• Software misconfiguration
• IP addresses
• Domains and Subdomains (including AWS S3 services)

It’s essential to recognize that comprehensive attack vector visibility doesn't eliminate the need for penetration tests. Even with the best vulnerability scanning solutions in place, unpredictable exposures, even those unknown to software providers, can still occur in digital apps (events known as zero-day vulnerabilities). Penetration tests are an invaluable aid to incident response teams, as they stress-test your cyber defenses from the fresh perspective of a threat actor.

Pen Tests reveal overlooked exposures, increasing your risk of suffering dangerous cyberattacks, such as malware and ransomware attacks.

Pen tests could also reveal your organization’s susceptibility to falling victim to social engineering and phishing attacks.

Learn how to design a simulated phishing test with ChatGPT >

Third-party monitoring

Comprehensive attack surface visibility is more than just being aware of internal and external IT assets. The larger your attack surface, the more options hackers and cybercriminals have to gain access to your network, including through your vendors and service providers. Enhance your visibility into vendors and service providers, and monitor for compromised credentials that have been dumped on the dark web.

Your attack surface visibility tool should extend beyond the boundaries of the surface web to include internet regions known for hosting compromised credentials, such as dark web forums and marketplaces. This practice, known as data leak detection, continuously scans the dark web and the surface web for listings matching predetermined keywords that map to internal credentials.

When used in conjunction with other attack surface management features, data leak detection offers the most comprehensive protection against data breaches.

Continuous change detection

An ideal visibility tool should offer real-time monitoring. Set up alerting for newly exposed assets or expired certificates. Continuous attack surface monitoring allows you to confirm your cyber risk management efforts in the evolving risk landscape.

Having complete visibility of internal and external attack surfaces sets the foundation for comprehensive asset inventory tracking. Asset discovery is a complicated and frustrating process because an organization's attack surface increases as new security tools, digital solutions, and vendor relationships are established.

The larger your attack surface, the more options hackers and cybercriminals have to gain access to your network.

To address the complication of attack surface expansion, an ideal visibility tool should offer real-time monitoring, preferably with features such as IP address range monitoring, to mitigate the threat of unknown assets and shadow IT devices.

Integrated for instant automation

An attack surface visibility tool must include a cyber risk scoring mechanism, formally known as security ratings. This effort allows you to confirm your cyber risk management efforts in the evolving risk landscape. These security ratings can be integrated with attack surface monitoring, automating the detection of security risks.

Continuous attack surface monitoring doesn’t just keep you aware of your growing asset inventory; it also helps you stay informed about potential vulnerabilities. This effort enables you to align your cyber risk management efforts with the evolving risk landscape.

To bridge the gap between digital asset awareness and emerging risk awareness, an attack surface visibility tool must include a cyber risk scoring mechanism, formally known as security ratings.

Security ratings are an objective, unbiased quantification of an organization’s security posture. Calculated through a consideration of multiple attack vector categories, the security rating represents an organization’s posture.

Top Attack Surface Visibility Tools

While a strong security posture relies on key practices, having the right software can streamline those efforts. The following solutions are leaders in the attack surface visibility space, comparing management and vulnerability, each offering a range of features to meet different organizational needs.

1. UpGuard

UpGuard provides automated external asset discovery, continuous monitoring, and robust third-party risk management features. The platform's strengths include a strong user interface (UI), robust reporting, and real-time exposure alerts.

Internal and external attack surface coverage

This attack surface management platform continuously monitors for security risks and potential attack vectors, mapping from internal and external assets. By incorporating risk assessment and remediation workflows, detected risks can be instantly pushed through vulnerability management lifecycles to mitigate threats that impact security posture health rapidly.

Dark web monitoring

UpGuard’s data leak detection engine can help you quickly discover and shut down compromised credentials dumped on the dark web before hackers exploit them. To help you have the greatest confidence in the validity of each detected leak, UpGuard security experts manually evaluate each detected leak to contextualize its occurrence, removing the risk of false positives.

Asset inventory tracking 

The continuous attack surface monitoring engine automatically detects new domains mapping to your organization’s attack surface, helping you stay on top of your expanding attack surface. By allowing users to specify IP monitoring ranges, UpGuard instantly acknowledges devices connected within these ranges as soon as they become active, mitigating unknown assets and shadow IT risks.

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Continuous monitoring

UpGuard’s security rating feature helps organizations track emerging risks that impact their security postures, even between assessment schedules. By leveraging its security ratings engine within its risk remediation workflow, UpGuard enables users to assess the potential impact of selected remediation tasks, allowing security teams to prioritize remediations with the most significant positive impact.

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When integrated with attack surface management, security ratings automate the process of identifying and mitigating security risks.

To illustrate this, consider the most common approach for identifying internal and external security risks: risk assessments. When used alone, risk assessments often fail to account for emerging cyber risks that occur between assessment schedules.

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However, when combined with security ratings, emerging risks between risk assessments are detected through declinations in an organization’s security posture. These events then trigger further and more detailed investigations through security questionnaires or impromptu risk assessments.

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UpGuard’s security rating feature helps organizations track emerging risks that impact their security postures, even between assessment schedules. By leveraging its security ratings engine within its risk remediation workflow, UpGuard enables users to assess the potential impact of selected remediation tasks, allowing security teams to prioritize remediations with the most significant positive impact.

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Watch this video for an overview of UpGuard’s Attack Surface Management (ASM) features.

Take a self-guided tour of the UpGuard platform >

2. CyCognito

Known for its deep web scans, CyCognito provides visibility into shadow assets. The tool focuses on mapping an organization's infrastructure from the perspective of an attacker to identify the most likely points of entry.

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3. Randori (by IBM)

Randori offers attacker-centric asset identification and risk prioritization. The platform includes continuous red-teaming functionality to stress-test your cyber defenses and reveal overlooked exposures.

4. Palo Alto Cortex Xpanse

Cortex Xpanse provides broad coverage across cloud and IP ranges, with integrations into the broader Palo Alto Networks ecosystem. It is well-suited for large enterprises seeking to identify and manage unknown risks at scale.

5. SecurityScorecard

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SecurityScorecard focuses on external posture scoring and vendor risk ratings. The platform features continuous monitoring, enabling security teams to identify emerging risks and compare their security posture with that of their partners.

Real-World benefits and use cases

Attack surface visibility is not just a theoretical concept; its value is proven through real-world applications across various industries. By providing a clear and comprehensive view of all digital assets, organizations can prevent breaches, improve compliance, and streamline security operations.

Retailer: Identified misconfigured staging servers before a holiday campaign

A retail company used an attack surface visibility tool to continuously monitor its digital infrastructure ahead of its busiest holiday shopping season. The tool identified a misconfigured staging server with an open port and weak security protocols, which could have been a potential entry point for an attacker. By detecting this vulnerability and addressing it before it could be exploited, the security team was able to mitigate the risk and prevent a potential breach that could have disrupted operations or led to data theft.

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Fintech: Legacy IP range still tied to live customer systems uncovered

A fintech company with a complex and evolving network used an attack surface visibility solution to perform a thorough audit of its assets. The solution uncovered a legacy IP range that was still connected to live customer systems but was no longer under active management by the IT team. This provided critical insight into a previously overlooked piece of infrastructure that lacked modern security controls, enabling the company to properly decommission it and contain the threat to a specific segment of the network.

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SaaS: Provider used visibility to confirm vendor infrastructure compliance

 With the proliferation of third-party SaaS applications, providers needed to ensure that their vendors were upholding their security obligations. The company utilized a visibility tool to continuously evaluate its vendors’ security postures, including their data protection measures and compliance with industry frameworks such as NIST and ISO 27001. This proactive due diligence not only helped the SaaS provider maintain compliance with industry regulations, but it also built greater trust with its customers by validating that their data was being handled securely.

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Visibility: Your strategic cybersecurity advantage

As this article has shown, organizations that fall victim to a data breach are often those with a lack of awareness of their attack surface. Attack surface visibility is a foundational practice that empowers security teams to proactively identify, monitor, and mitigate risks before an attacker can exploit them.

By implementing key practices such as continuous asset discovery, third-party monitoring, and change detection, and leveraging modern tools, you can build a bridge between education and decision-making, ensuring that your organization is well-equipped to defend against the ever-evolving threat landscape. Ultimately, the more comprehensive your attack surface visibility, the more effective your cybersecurity program will be.

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