What is External Attack Surface Management (EASM)?

As businesses grow, so does their digital footprint and exposure to high-risk cyber threats. External attack surface management (EASM) is the continuous practice of identifying, monitoring, and securing public-facing assets, such as forgotten subdomains and expired certificates that attackers could exploit. 

Think of your digital presence like a sprawling office building. You may have locked the front door (your company’s primary website), but what about the side entrances, basement windows, or service elevators no one uses anymore?

EASM helps security teams spotlight every potential entry point and lockdown the forgotten, overlooked, and unguarded digital paths that malicious threat actors love to abuse.

What Is Your External Attack Surface?

Your external attack surface is essentially the conglomeration of assets and systems that are publicly accessible over the internet, whether intentionally or unintentionally. These are often the first attack vectors (cyber speak for entry points or methods) that malicious users (attackers, hackers, and other cybercriminals) use to target an organization. 

It can be helpful to imagine your external attack surface as your organization’s digital perimeter. However, this perimeter isn’t a neat, orderly fence. It’s more like an assortment of doors, tunnels, and hidden entrances that shift as your infrastructure evolves. 

Here are some examples of external assets that may be present in your attack surface: 

• A forgotten subdomain from an old marketing campaign
• An exposed API left open by a contractor
• A wildcard SSL certificate that quietly expired last month
• A cloud storage bucket mistakenly set to “public”
• An AI model endpoint left exposed during Ollama testing

These are the kinds of assets that often slip through the cracks, and the ones security teams design their external attack surface management programs to find, track, and secure before attackers begin to plan their assault. EASM focuses on continuously discovering and securing these assets because if attackers can’t find them, they can’t target them.

How EASM relates to Attack Surface Management (ASM)

External attack surface management is a focused area within the broader field of attack surface management (ASM). While ASM covers both internal and external assets, EASM zeroes in on what’s exposed to the public internet.

For security teams, the benefits ASM provides include the following: 

• Real-time asset discovery: Identifies exposed digital assets as soon as they appear, whether from new deployments, cloud services, third-party integrations, or employee activity
• Continuous asset inventory: Maintains an up-to-date inventory of all your public-facing assets and reduces common attack surface blindspots caused by shadow IT, forgotten infrastructure, or organizational sprawl 
• Early exposure alerting: Provides timely insights and enables faster action when configurations change, new services come online, or existing systems become vulnerable 
• Threat intelligence and preparedness: Contextualizes attack surface risks by aligning your assets and data with known vulnerabilities, cybercriminal trends, and external threat intelligence feeds.
• Vulnerability remediation: Vulnerability management is a subset of ASM that focuses specifically on identifying, classifying, prioritizing, and securing vulnerabilities. 
• Compliance: Supports ongoing compliance demands by providing clear visibility and evidence of the security controls your team has in place, including the ones most scrutinized by current and future security and data protection regulations

The primary purpose of attack surface management is to help security teams transition from reactive firefighting to proactive digital risk management.

Related Reading: What is Attack Surface Management? Definition + ASM Guide

How to Build an External Attack Surface Management Program

As modern organizations expand their digital footprint across cloud platforms, SaaS tools, and third-party integrations, the external attack surface becomes a dynamic and growing risk vector. Effective EASM is no longer optional—it’s essential for proactively identifying and mitigating threats before they’re exploited.

But building a mature EASM capability isn’t plug-and-play. For most security teams, it’s a continuous journey of discovery, assessment, and refinement. And given the scale and speed at which exposures emerge (shadow IT, unpatched systems, exposed ports, outdated services, etc.), automated EASM platforms like UpGuard Breach Risk can significantly reduce the burden by providing complete visibility, risk prioritization, and guided remediation from day one.

Here’s a simplified roadmap for developing a manual EASM capability:

1. Discover your external assets

Begin by cataloging every internet-facing asset your organization owns or controls. Use a combination of internal documentation, DNS lookups, certificate transparency logs, and WHOIS records to identify domains, subdomains, and IP addresses. Be diligent about uncovering shadow IT, forgotten environments, or staging instances, since these are often overlooked but frequently targeted.

2. Attribute ownership

Assign each asset to the appropriate team or owner across IT, security, or DevOps. Clear ownership ensures accountability for fixing exposures and streamlines incident response. Keep your asset inventory updated and enriched with metadata like purpose, criticality, and linked business units.

3. Monitor for infrastructure changes

Since external attack surfaces are dynamic, set a regular cadence to rescan and validate assets. Track for changes such as new services, expiring certificates, or modified configurations. Spreadsheets can work in the short term, but they don’t scale well. Consistency is ultimately key when visibility gaps can lead to real-world data breaches.

4. Prioritize risks based on business impact

Not all exposures are equally dangerous. When assessing risk, consider factors like whether an asset is public-facing, whether common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) are present, what’s likely to be attacked (KEV and EPSS), and the potential business impact it could cause if compromised (CVSS). Use public vulnerability feeds and security benchmarks to inform your assessments.

5. Remediate issues and report progress

Document issues clearly and assign them to the appropriate teams for resolution. Track risk remediation efforts over time and prepare audit logs to demonstrate compliance or risk reduction. You may need to manually compile reports from disparate sources to show your security posture to stakeholders or insurers.

How a dedicated EASM solution can help

While it’s possible to build and maintain an EASM program manually, doing so effectively requires significant time, coordination, and ongoing effort, especially as your infrastructure scales.

That’s where UpGuard Breach Risk can transform your approach. It continuously maps your external assets, detects real-world threats (like forgotten subdomains, open ports, misconfigurations, and out-of-date software), and prioritizes what to fix first based on real exploitability. With built-in workflows, alert integrations, and audit-ready reports, UpGuard helps security teams cut through the noise, reduce their external attack surface, and prove they’re actively managing risk. 

Why Is External Attack Surface Management Important?

EASM is a vital frontline defense, especially in today’s business world, where cyber attacks and data breaches that originate outside an organization’s firewall continue to increase in frequency.

Modern organizations operate at a rapid pace and are increasingly relying on cloud deployments, remote workforces, and continuous infrastructure changes to keep up and outpace their competition. Without a robust external attack surface management program, it can be way too easy for assets to be spun up, forgotten, and misconfigured. These blind spots and untracked assets can leave your organization vulnerable in ways your traditional perimeter surveillance strategies can’t see. 

Key benefits of EASM include: 

• Faster breach detection: Identify exposed systems and vulnerabilities before attackers discover them.
• Stronger threat awareness: Maintain a real-time understanding of your organization’s public-facing footprint.
• Reduced exposure window: Detect and remediate misconfigurations or expiring certificates before they become incidents.
• Better audit and compliance readiness: Demonstrate continuous security monitoring and proactive risk management to regulators and insurers.
• Surface unexpected risks: Discover unknown or shadow assets introduced by internal teams, contractors, or third-party vendors operating under your brand.
  

Disclaimer: While an effective EASM program can identify assets managed by third-party providers across your public-facing assets, it by no means replaces a holistic third-party risk management or vendor risk management solution. To fully mitigate third-party risks and manage an evolving vendor ecosystem or supply chain, you’ll need to create a custom TPRM program, install risk assessment workflows, and likely deploy a leading solution like UpGuard's risk remediation software.

What Is an External Attack Surface Management Solution?

External attack surface management solutions are specialized cybersecurity tools that automatically and continuously scan, identify, and track internet-facing assets and exposures. The best EASM tools eliminate manual work from security teams’ daily to-do lists and provide them with advanced visibility and insights to secure risks they might never have known existed. 

As a business’s digital infrastructure grows, it also decentralizes and becomes exponentially harder to oversee, manage, and secure. Traditional cybersecurity and information technology tools often miss assets outside an organization’s known perimeter.

EASM solutions help security teams answer questions like: 

• What unknown or shadow assets are exposed right now? 
• Are any of our internet-facing systems misconfigured or vulnerable? 
• Which assets pose the most significant real-world risk? 
• Are any expired or misused certificates leaving us open to interception or impersonation?
• Are there open ports or services that shouldn’t be accessible from the public internet?
• Are any of our exposed services running outdated or unpatched software?

A best-in-class EASM platform should offer more than fundamental asset discovery. It should provide deep visibility, continuous monitoring, and threat context. Here's a checklist of what to look for when evaluating solutions: 

• Automated domain and subdomain monitoring: Detect subdomain takeovers, abandoned infrastructure, and unauthorized DNS changes. Breach Risk performs daily scans and uses certificate transparency logs and DNS records to uncover hidden exposures that attackers can exploit.
• On-demand and continuous scanning: Scheduled and on-demand scans give teams the flexibility to validate changes immediately or monitor continuously for emerging exposures across domains, IPs, and cloud services.
• SSL/TLS certificate health monitoring: Track certificate validity across your entire public-facing infrastructure. Breach Risk flags expired or weak certificates that can undermine user trust or open the door to interception attacks.
• Exposure probing and evaluation: See what attackers see before they act. Breach Risk uses external-facing probes to detect misconfigurations, open ports, outdated services, and exposed technologies that increase risk. 
• Integrations: Alerts from Breach Risk integrate directly into your existing workflows (Slack, Jira, etc.), enabling faster triage, automated response, and seamless collaboration across IT and security.
• Real-world risk scoring and prioritization: Not all findings are equal. Breach Risk leverages KEV (known exploited vulnerabilities), EPSS (exploit prediction scoring system), and CVE intelligence to spotlight what truly matters.
• Change detection and historical asset insights: Your attack surface evolves daily. Breach Risk retains historical asset data and monitors for new or modified infrastructure, helping you detect risk drift, emerging exposures, and remediation regressions.

Understanding Breach Risk’s External Attack Surface Monitoring and Scanning Features

Imagine you’re part of a lean, vigilant security team at a mid-sized financial services company. It’s Wednesday morning, and while you’re not currently responding to an active incident, you know your external threat exposure is constantly changing, even if it’s behind the scenes. This is exactly where UpGuard Breach Risk goes to work for you.

Here’s what that process looks like when Breach Risk identifies a new exposure across your organization’s external-facing assets:

What gets scanned?

Breach Risk continuously monitors all the public internet and surface assets tied to your organization (even those you didn’t deploy yourself). 

• DNS records: Scanned to detect live and forgotten subdomains
• IP addresses: Monitored for new services, exposed ports, and geolocation anomalies
• Domains and related infrastructure: Reviewed to track your brand’s online presence and uncover hidden risks like shadow IT and Internet of Things (IOT) infrastructure exposed to the internet.

How often does Breach Risk scan? 

UpGuard Breach Risk performs continuous daily scanning across your external attack surface. Every known and newly discovered domain, IP address, and other internet-facing asset is evaluated at least once every 24 hours. This cadence ensures near real-time visibility into infrastructure changes, so misconfigurations, vulnerable services, and shadow IT assets don’t remain undetected for long.

Unlike legacy tools that scan on a fixed schedule or miss updates between runs, Breach Risk adapts as your environment evolves, offering a high-confidence, always-current view of your organization’s exposure.

What detection methods are used?

Breach Risk doesn’t rely on just a single scan type. The platform layers various intelligence sources to uncover hidden or unreported assets:

• Reverse DNS lookups: Identify domains and subdomains associated with your known infrastructure.
• Certificate transparency logs: Reveal new domain registrations tied to your organization, even when internal teams forget to report them.
• WHOIS data and ASN correlations: Help attribute infrastructure ownership, so assets registered to a contractor, vendor, or forgotten business unit still surface on your radar.

This multilayered discovery helps identify not only obvious assets but also those that go unnoticed by standard internal tracking systems.

What’s detected? 

Once the scanning phase is complete, Breach Risk analyzes assets for risk signals, such as:

• Open or misconfigured ports that expose internal services or admin panels
• Expired or weak SSL/TLS certificates that leave data in transit vulnerable
• Publicly accessible storage or databases are often the result of cloud misconfigurations
• Unauthorized changes to a previously secured asset, such as redirects or page injections

What happens next?

The moment an exposure is detected, Breach Risk sends a real-time alert directly to users across your team. You don’t have to wait for a weekly scan or a quarterly audit report.

From there:

• A risk score is automatically applied based on exploitability, exposure, and asset criticality.
• The issue is logged and visualized in your dashboard alongside historical asset data.
• You can assign, investigate, or export the details as part of a compliance-ready report.

In just minutes, your team can go from unknown exposure to actionable insight with a clear path to remediation and the context needed to prioritize.

Common Use cases for EASM solutions

Here’s how security teams like yours are using EASM solutions to secure their attack surface: 

• Shadow IT discovery: Identify unknown or unauthorized digital assets outside centralized IT control, like shadow AI.
• Legacy infrastructure detection: Uncover outdated or forgotten assets still publicly accessible, such as old dev environments or deprecated applications.
• Subdomain takeover prevention: Monitor DNS records to detect and mitigate the risk of unclaimed or vulnerable subdomains. These domains can host phishing kits, malware, and ransomware campaigns.
• SSL/TLS certificate monitoring: Track certificates for upcoming expirations or weak configurations across public-facing systems.
• Third-party asset identification: Discover assets hosted or managed by vendors and subsidiaries that still fall under your domain or branding.
• Certificate transparency and typosquatting defense: Monitor for domain impersonation and unauthorized brand-linked registrations.
• Continuous change tracking: Monitor changes across the attack surface, including asset additions, removals, and configuration shifts.
• Security control validation: Validate the external visibility of patched or hardened assets to ensure intended security controls are in place.
• Audit preparation and compliance support: Maintain asset inventories and exposure logs to satisfy regulatory requirements and frameworks like ISO 27001, CPS 230, DORA, or SOC 2.

Breach Risk Case Study with Anglo-Eastern

Facing increased cyber scrutiny and complex compliance demands across shore-based and maritime environments, Anglo-Eastern turned to UpGuard to transform its ad hoc cybersecurity practices. By adopting Breach Risk, the company gained real-time visibility into its external attack surface, neutralized typosquatting threats, and automated daily risk reporting. With fewer false positives and tighter integrations into daily operations, UpGuard became a core enabler of audit readiness, client trust, and operational efficiency.

How Anglo-Eastern harnesses UpGuard Breach Risk:

• Automated daily threat reports delivered via Microsoft Teams

• Real-time monitoring of external exposures, vulnerabilities, and potential threats
• Vulnerability assessment and prioritization
• Typosquatting detection and takedown of fraudulent domains
• High-fidelity findings with reduced false positives
• Continuous compliance for unannounced audits from clients
• Competitive security benchmarking in client presentations

“UpGuard isn’t just a tool—it’s an enabler. It helps us demonstrate to clients, regulators, and internal stakeholders that we take cybersecurity seriously. That’s a game-changer in today’s threat landscape.”  - Xerxes Kio Khan, Head of Information Security at Anglo-Eastern

Read the complete case study: How Anglo-Eastern Shifted to Proactive Cybersecurity with UpGuard

How UpGuard Helps with External Attack Surface Management

UpGuard Breach Risk is a complete external attack surface management solution. Unlike other piecemeal solutions, Breach Risk gives security teams the comprehensive visibility and holistic insights needed to manage public-facing threats and develop a robust enterprise ASM program. 

Keen to learn more about how Breach Risk can help your security team? Explore UpGuard in action and take a detailed tour of the Breach Risk platform.