Introduction
With the continued adoption of cloud technologies, SaaS platforms, remote work, connected devices, and third-party applications, there are many vectors that businesses now allow to communicate with their enterprise systems. There are also many reports from various vendors and tools that are helping us understand where our weaknesses may be.
Finding these security vulnerabilities and risks is one aspect. Knowing which assets are publicly exposed, what those assets are linked to, and how a weakness may present itself to the business is where we want to focus more attention.
There is a difference between managing your attack surface and vulnerability management.
Attack surface management (AMS) will allow you to know about your publicly exposed assets. Vulnerability management will find security vulnerabilities that can be patched and managed. We will look at how both play a role in exposure management.
As CISO’s and information security professionals, we want to not only know what we have deployed but take a deeper look at those assets and the risks that could affect our key business functions. This means having a view of all our assets, their exposure to vulnerabilities, understanding their business context, validating the risk, and then taking action to either patch or remove that exposure. All of this on a continuing basis.
What is Attack Surface Management?
Attack surface management is looking at your organization’s digitally exposed assets that could be breached by malicious actors.
Your attack surface can consist of websites, applications, and domains that are publicly facing. Your public IP addresses, internet-facing applications, domains and subdomains, third-party apps that you allow to communicate with your internal systems, and cloud resources, to name a few. Attack surface can also extend to your internally developed software and development environments.
You want to understand what you have exposed and keep it protected.
How Attack Surface Management Works
A tool or feature that allows you to discover and understand your attack surface will usually contain these elements:
- Find your digital assets
- Understand when and if that asset has changed
- Understand what asset you own or are responsible for
- Identify internet-facing exposure
- Understand how your business is impacted
- Remediate that exposure
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) focuses on understanding your externally facing assets. You may see some vendors include internal and external exposure management features. Be sure to check which assets your solution will uncover.
What is External Attack Surface Management (EASM)? | NCSC talks about finding and securing your external assets that may be accessible to the internet. Many traditional vulnerability scans may not detect these exposures.
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management (VM) will help you identify, mitigate, and remediate vulnerabilities found in your organization.
A vulnerability can be a vulnerability in your code that was written incorrectly or maybe a misconfiguration. Some common vulnerabilities that we find in our day-to-day jobs are outdated or unpatched software, vulnerable configurations, and third-party applications.
By finding these vulnerabilities, we can start the process of remediating them and protecting our business.
How Vulnerability Management Works
A good vulnerability management program will help you find and understand vulnerabilities on your assets. Then take steps to remediate the issues that are discovered.
- Find known vulnerabilities and configurations that are considered unsafe
- Identify what vulnerability a finding belongs to (CVEs)
- Understand how risky those vulnerabilities are to your business
- Remediate those risks
- Patch or apply mitigations to that finding
- Validate that you have patched
- Report on your vulnerability metrics
As stated above, vulnerability management allows us to find these vulnerabilities and secure our environment. There are many vulnerability management solutions that can assist in helping you manage your vulnerabilities.
How Do They Differ?
As you can see, attack surface management and vulnerability management share many similarities. But there are a few differences that we want to highlight.
| Dimension |
Attack surface management |
Vulnerability management |
| Primary question |
What assets and potential entry points are exposed? |
Which security weaknesses need to be addressed? |
| Main focus |
Asset discovery, visibility, reachability, and exposure |
Vulnerability assessment, prioritization, remediation, and verification |
| Typical inputs |
Domains, DNS records, cloud inventories, internet-facing services, asset relationships |
Vulnerability scans, CVE data, endpoint inventories, configuration assessments, threat intelligence |
| Common findings |
Unknown assets, exposed services, misconfigurations, forgotten environments, vulnerable internet-facing systems |
Missing patches, vulnerable software versions, insecure configurations, vulnerable dependencies |
| Typical output |
An asset and exposure view, with findings requiring investigation or action |
A prioritized set of vulnerabilities and remediation activities |
| Key success measure |
Coverage and accuracy of asset visibility, reduced unwanted exposure |
Timely, verified remediation of relevant vulnerabilities |
| Primary limitation |
Discovery alone does not prove exploitability or establish the complete business risk |
A vulnerability list may miss unknown assets and broader attack paths |
If you launched a new customer portal that was accessible from the internet and forgot about it after some time. You may find that asset through your attack surface tool. Not knowing who owns that portal and it may expose a public facing service that no longer should be accessible.
With that information you can scan the portal for any known vulnerabilities that may exist and begin the remediation process. Once you know that the vulnerabilities on that portal have been patched, you can retire that system and no longer have to worry about it being exploited.
So you can see that they both work hand in hand to protect your business.
How Attack Surface Management Falls Short without Vulnerability Management
Knowing what you have exposed and who is responsible for those assets is key. But once we know that, we need to be able to secure those assets from threats. Without vulnerability management, we could be finding new assets that are vulnerable to attacks and not know what to do about it.
This is where vulnerability management comes into play and finds those weaknesses we can take action against.
How Vulnerability Management Falls Short without Attack Surface Management
If all you have is vulnerability management, you will not know about newly discovered assets that may be exposed to threats. There will also be unknown vulnerabilities that you do not know how to address because they fall outside of what a typical vulnerability scanner can find.
This leads us to exposure management. By using both attack Surface Management and vulnerability management, we can better protect our businesses from cyber threats.
- What do I have that is accessible from the internet or may be vulnerable to attacks?
- What vulnerabilities and/or risks are present in my business?
- What are those vulnerabilities and risks going to impact in my business?
- How do I fix these issues?
All of these questions lead us to exposure management.
What is Exposure Management?
Exposure management is a combination of your attack surface and vulnerabilities that may affect your business. It can also include weaknesses found in identity management and other factors. We will look at the different factors that we use to build our exposure management solution.
Having too much vulnerability data is just as bad as not having enough. You want to know what you have that can affect your key business functions. By knowing that information, you can begin to focus on the risk that presents the highest level of risk to your business.
Some things to consider when building your risk model.
- What are the assets you are trying to protect?
- Is the asset you are trying to protect publicly exposed?
- Do you have a known vulnerability in that asset?
- Is that vulnerability being exploited?
- Do you have privileged access to that system that may give you access to higher data?
- Are you compensating with any existing controls?
- What risk are you willing to accept by keeping that asset exposed?
There are many methods that will help you understand how to properly identify your exposure to risk. One resource I found helpful is Gartner’s concept of Continuous Threat Exposure Management CTEM. No matter what solution you implement, having these concepts will help your overall exposure management.
What Do You Need to Know Before You Build Your Exposure Management Solution?
Now that we know we need attack surface management and vulnerability management, how do we go about implementing these solutions in our business?
- Know what assets you want to protect and why you want to protect them.
- Make sure you have full asset discovery capabilities. Not just from attack surface tools but from your internal tools as well.
- Begin to consolidate your vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and attack surface data into one platform. Understand the risk these assets present to your business and how to remediate them.
- Understand which vulnerabilities and exposures present a higher level of risk to your business. By understanding this, you can triage your risk faster and focus your time where it’s needed.
- Validate that your top risk findings are true. Once validated, you can move forward with securing your assets.
- Communicate with your security team and begin patching or applying controls to secure your assets. If you can’t patch within your designated SLA, work with your business and risk owner to document your risk and what you are doing to compensate.
- Validate that the vulnerabilities have been patched or the exposure has been removed.
Once you have these pieces in place, you can begin to measure your exposure and see if your controls are effective.
Below are some metrics that will help you better understand your exposure to risk.
| Metric |
What it measures |
Why it matters |
| Asset discovery coverage |
Share of in-scope assets identified and reconciled |
Indicates whether important assets may be missing |
| Unknown asset resolution time |
Time taken to identify and address newly discovered assets |
Shows how quickly visibility gaps are closed |
| Critical exposure remediation time |
Time from validated finding to verified remediation |
Tracks response to high-priority risk |
| Known exploited vulnerability backlog |
Relevant unresolved findings associated with known exploitation |
Helps focus attention on urgent weaknesses |
| Exposure recurrence rate |
Frequency of previously resolved issues returning |
Highlights recurring process or configuration problems |
| Overdue remediation rate |
Share of findings past their agreed remediation target |
Indicates whether teams can execute the plan |
| Critical asset coverage |
Share of critical business assets included in monitoring and assessment |
Connects security coverage to business priorities |
| Verified risk reduction |
Number or proportion of priority exposures demonstrably mitigated |
Shows whether the program is reducing actual exposure |
Remember that you want to know what you have covered and not how many vulnerabilities you found. By segmenting your metrics, you can better understand where your risk is increasing and what you can do about it.
What You Should Know When Deploying an Exposure Management Solution
As we can see, there are many moving parts that need to work together to successfully reduce your attack surface. Here are some tips to help when rolling out an exposure management program.
Knowing your findings can get overwhelming. By understanding what your business is looking to protect and how you can leverage exploits, you can reduce the workload.
Have your business understand what they are responsible for. If you find an asset that isn’t associated with an owner, you want to make sure to dig deeper and understand who owns that asset.
Integrating all your tools and making them talk to each other can be a challenge. But it can save you a lot of time in the end. Make sure to understand what data points will help your business.
Understand that your vulnerabilities and attack surface will give you risk scores. Those scores can vary from product to product. Make sure you know what each vendor is basing their score off of.
Communicate with your patch teams and make sure you have a process to get vulnerabilities remediated. Have SLA’s in place that allow you to escalate risks that are not being patched.
Report to your executives on how your exposure management is helping reduce your risk. Not how many findings you found and remediated.
How AI Can Strengthen Exposure Management
We know that finding vulnerabilities and exposed assets can be difficult sometimes. With AI, we can begin to analyze all those vulnerabilities and assets to help secure our business. There are many features that can help us speed up our processes. From finding vulnerabilities to patching, we can begin to reduce our exposure.
Always make sure that your AI has trusted data that it is pulling from. Having inaccurate data will produce inaccurate risk findings. AI will help speed up our workflow, but make sure to always validate the risks it produces.
Automations are also helpful to streamline our processes. By automating simple tasks, we can begin to free up time for our analysts to look at the big picture. Always make sure your automation has proper steps to roll back any unintended changes it may have made to your systems.
How Hexaware Supports Cybersecurity and Exposure Reduction
Here are some links to articles that Hexaware has published about their security services.
They explain how their solutions can help you manage your risk using AI and their partnership with Microsoft. They have many Cybersecurity articles that will help you learn more about their exposure management capabilities.
Hexaware’s Information and Cyber Security services. They discuss how they help customers with information security, security governance, and vulnerability Management.
As you can see, there are many pieces that need to come together to create an effective exposure management solution. By knowing what assets you want to protect and leveraging vulnerability and attack surface management, you can begin to reduce your risk.
Conclusion
Attack surface management and vulnerability management solve different but connected problems. ASM helps organizations discover exposed assets and understand where potential entry points exist. VM provides the processes needed to assess and remediate vulnerabilities. Exposure management connects their findings with business context, validation, and accountable action.
For enterprises with expanding cloud estates, complex supply chains, and changing digital services, treating these disciplines as separate workstreams can leave important gaps. A connected strategy makes it easier to identify unknown assets, prioritize exploitable weaknesses, coordinate remediation, and verify that risk has actually been reduced.
Start with critical business services, improve asset visibility, consolidate the most relevant findings, and build a repeatable path from discovery to verified remediation. Over time, measure success by the exposures removed and the protection gained, rather than by the number of alerts processed.
