In 1985, we lived in a material world. In 2025, we live in a digital world. Between remote workers, eCommerce businesses, and the cloud, organizations need to be more aware of their growing attack surface – and think like attackers.
Attack surface management (ASM) helps you do just that. Attack surface management tools map out an organization’s entire digital footprint to understand and manage its risks. End-to-end visibility of the hybrid attack surface shows you how attackers would traverse through your network and highlights your greatest risks. By thinking like an attacker instead of a defender, you will understand how they would penetrate your networks and cause harm and take steps to close these gaps.
What is the attack surface?
In every organization, big or small, a cybercriminal enters your network in many ways. Common attack vectors include phishing, malware, or entries through unknown or out-of-date/misconfigured assets. While it’s hard to defend against every attack, organizations protect themselves through comprehensive awareness of their attack surface.
Understanding how a cybercriminal compromises your network enables you to take precautions to secure those entry points and pathways to keep your critical data secure. In the digital world we live in in 2025, it is critical for organizations to achieve complete visibility and have continuous monitoring in place to remove or manage vulnerabilities and other risks before attackers find them.
To understand your attack surface, consider things such as:
- How will an attacker enter my network?
- What are the most critical assets they’ll want to reach?
- How will they travel through my network?
- What should I do to protect my network?
Why Attack Surface Management?
The traditional security stack is comprised of a patchwork of products. Individual products such as vulnerability scanners or endpoint detection tools help organizations focus on a specific pain point or problem but do not provide a comprehensive view of the attack surface. But as people and companies rely more and more on digital assets, it’s become nearly impossible to use these point solutions to manage a complex digital landscape. Organizations in 2025 need a better way to visualize their network for a proactive approach to cybersecurity.
A continuous attack surface management tool monitors your network and its assets. This empowers an organization to continuously perform attack surface analysis to identify and decrease risk. This proactive approach requires mapping out the hybrid attack surface, including air-gapped or OT networks, so that you have a full view of your vulnerable assets. When new vulnerabilities pop up, you will know where in your network they lie and if they’ll open a path to a critical asset or system.
There are different ways to approach ASM. Some, like External Attack Surface Management, focus on internet-facing assets; others, like Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management, look at your entire attack surface. Regardless of the approach, having visibility of your hybrid attack surface is the key to securing your organization.
Implementing Attack Surface Management
Understanding how to manage your attack surface is a great first step. But how do you know what makes an effective ASM program?
An effective ASM program includes the following:
- Asset discovery builds and maintains a comprehensive, up-to-date inventory of your network, server, and cloud assets to understand your full attack surface
- An attack surface map to provide full visibility of your networks and understand each asset’s vulnerability and potential severity impact
- Automated prioritization of your risks based on factors including CVSS score, likelihood of exploitation, and business context
- Remediation recommendations, including alternative compensating controls when patching isn’t imminent
- The continuous monitoring of your attack surface to ensure you quickly respond to emerging threats
The attack surface is rapidly changing. Organizations need full, real-time visibility to maintain a proactive security posture. With the critical insights provided through an ASM solution, security teams better understand their organization’s most significant risks and mitigate or remediate these vulnerabilities first, maximizing the value of their efforts.
Skybox Security understands the importance of attack surface visibility and believes all organizations should have total visibility of their networks. Our Model Explorer solution is included within our Continuous Exposure Management platform to help our customers stay ahead of the ever-expanding attack surface.
Discover how Skybox can help you get better visibility to your attack surface:
