Seeing The Whole Picture: A Better Way To Manage Your Attack Surface

Last updated at Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Do you trust your view of your organization’s risk?

With cloud adoption, remote work, shadow IT, and AI, security teams face an overwhelming challenge: scoping their attack surface and continuously discovering all assets and exposures before threats emerge. This aligns with the critical first steps of a Continuous Threat Exposure Management Program (CTEM), which emphasizes the importance of scoping and discovery.

This visibility gap has significant consequences. In 2024, 14% of breaches happened because attackers exploited vulnerabilities to gain initial access — that's almost triple the amount from 2023 (Verizon DBIR 2024). This isn't surprising when you consider that only 17% of organizations feel confident that they can find and list at least 95% of their assets, according to Gartner Innovation Insight: Attack Surface Management 2024 research. Without a clear plan for scoping and discovery, organizations can't effectively secure their assets because they don't know what they're trying to protect.

If you don't have a complete picture of your entire IT estate — inclusive of internal and external facing assets — you're going to miss vulnerabilities and leave openings that attackers can exploit. That's why it's so important to continuously scan and discover your assets so that you always have an accurate, up-to-date view of your attack surface. This is where tools like external attack surface management (EASM) and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) come into play because they give you a single view of everything you have and can highlight what's exposed. Gaining this visibility will help your security teams proactively detect, prioritize, and remediate threats before they are exploited.

Why you need a complete view of your attack surface

Let's face it, as organizations grow, their potential vulnerabilities grow right along with them. This creates complexity for security teams who are already struggling to keep up. They've tried to solve this by adding more and more security tools, but this often backfires and creates a fragmented view that makes it harder to see the whole picture.

To truly reduce risk and strengthen your defenses, you need a unified approach that combines EASM and CAASM.

Even organizations who embrace EASM or CAASM may end up with a disjointed security toolset. Many organizations try to manage their attack surface with either an EASM, a CAASM, or other separate tools, but this often results in an incomplete view of the attack surface, creating blind spots and leading to missed vulnerabilities. This fragmented approach also fails to identify critical control gaps. For example, if an asset is not visible, it might be overlooked that it lacks an endpoint agent or is not protected by a firewall.

Why EASM or CAASM alone fall short

EASM solutions are highly effective for monitoring internet-facing assets, including web applications, cloud services, and third-party integrations. However, they cannot provide visibility into internal environments that are not publicly accessible. This includes non-internet-facing components of on-prem infrastructure, privileged systems, and certain shadow IT assets.

CAASM solutions provide internal visibility, aggregating data from security tools, asset inventories, and IT management systems. They're great at identifying misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and security gaps within an organization's controlled environment. However, CAASM tools can’t account for external exposures, leaving an incomplete picture of how attackers could gain initial access. Additionally, CAASM solutions are completely reliant on 3rd party tools and integrations, meaning that you are adding yet another tool to your tech stack that you have to pay for and manage.

Disparate tools, disjointed defense

To secure growing attack surfaces, many organizations rely on a mix of vulnerability management, cloud security posture management (CSPM), and application scanners. However, these tools often operate independently, leading to fragmented visibility and inefficiencies. Without a single source of truth, security teams struggle to correlate risks, resulting in missed threats, duplicate efforts, and slower response times. Managing multiple tools also increases alert fatigue and operational overhead, while leaving critical gaps in attack surface coverage.

Are you sensing a trend here?

The power of a unified view

A truly effective risk management strategy needs more than a bunch of different tools — it needs those tools to work together seamlessly, giving you a complete picture of all your assets and potential exposures. Security teams need one single source of truth that brings together data from all of their vulnerability management solutions. This will ensure that teams can:

• Strengthen Security Through Visibility

You have to know and trust what assets you have, where they are, and how they might be exposed. This is key to enforcing proper access controls, patching vulnerabilities, and applying the right security measures to your assets. With a full inventory, teams can be sure that no device, application, or cloud instance is left unprotected.

• Manage Risk Across Your Entire Attack Surface

A unified approach lets security teams prioritize the most critical risks across all digital environments, greatly reducing blind spots. With a unified view, organizations can detect patterns, understand attack paths, and proactively close security gaps before attackers can exploit them.

By integrating all of your exposure management capabilities into a single, centralized system, your organization can move from reactive security measures to a proactive and holistic approach — giving you the confidence to effectively defend against modern threats.

Take command of your attack surface

The threat landscape is constantly shifting, and it's more important than ever to have a complete and accurate view of your attack surface. It's time for security teams to ask some tough questions: Do we really have the insight we need to protect our organization? Are there blind spots that attackers could take advantage of? These questions are at the heart of the scoping and discovery phases within a CTEM program, prompting organizations to continuously evaluate and improve their attack surface visibility.

To get ahead of threats, organizations should simplify their security approach by reducing the number of tools they're using and find a solution that seamlessly combines EASM and CAASM. A unified view helps security teams find, prioritize, and reduce risks more effectively.

How Rapid7 can help

Rapid7 recently announced Exposure Command and Surface Command, the first two solutions launched on the new Command Platform. Surface Command provides complete visibility across internal and external environments by combining EASM and CAASM in a single solution, allowing security teams to view and prioritize high-risk assets across their entire environment. Exposure Command builds on Surface Command’s attack surface visibility, offering proactive exposure mitigation and remediation prioritization across your hybrid environment.