External Attack Surface Management (EASM) emerged with a bold promise: to illuminate the dark corners of an organization’s internet-facing infrastructure. It was sold as a panacea for “you don’t know what you don’t know,” offering security leaders the ability to see everything attackers could see. The expectation was straightforward—feed the EASM solution a few IP ranges or domains, and it would map your exposed assets, vulnerabilities, and risks.
But here’s the reality check: many early EASM tools barely scratched the surface.
The earliest wave of EASM tools were largely glorified search engines. They required “seed data”—IP ranges, known domains, CIDRs, or SSL certs. In short, they could only find what you already suspected existed.
These limitations created three critical problems for security teams:
As one industry report put it bluntly, “EASM tools created as many blind spots as they claimed to solve.”
So what’s the fix?
The future of EASM isn’t about feeding tools known IPs. It’s about understanding your organization the way an attacker does. That means:
This approach flips the model—from “scan what you tell me” to “show you what attackers already know.”
In practice, attacker-centric EASM routinely uncovers vast quantities of blind spots in large enterprises. During one proof-of-value engagement with a Fortune 500 firm, an attacker-oriented discovery model revealed that nearly 30% of the organization’s attack surface was unknown to internal teams. Not miscategorized—unknown. That included legacy domains with exposed login portals, forgotten S3 buckets hosting sensitive data, and third-party code repositories tied to core apps.
More critically, this model doesn’t stop at discovery. By layering on black-box security testing—mirroring how an attacker would exploit a vulnerability—these platforms can validate actual exposure. This eliminates false positives and allows security teams to focus resources on verified, business-critical risks.
As security leaders, we’re judged not by how many CVEs we scan, but by how effectively we reduce exploitability. That means knowing our true external footprint, understanding what’s valuable, and ensuring it’s secure.
But today’s IT environment is decentralized, cloud-first, and fast-moving. Developers spin up environments with a credit card, marketing teams can launch microsites in a weekend, M&A activity pulls in unmanaged infrastructure and EASM must match this pace with automation, improved context, and attacker awareness.
And yet, many organizations are still relying on seed-based, scan-and-forget tools built for a different era.
To keep up with the expanding threat landscape and shrinking tolerance for risk, the future of EASM must evolve along three vectors:
EASM promised visibility. For many, it delivered dashboards—but not answers.
The next phase of EASM isn’t about seeing more. It’s about seeing what matters—and taking action. That requires ditching legacy assumptions, embracing attacker-centric perspectives, and investing in solutions that automate discovery, attribution, validation, and prioritization at global scale.
Security leaders need more than “alerts.” They need proof. Proof of exposure, proof of exploitability, and proof of risk reduction.
The visibility revolution isn’t over. It’s just getting started. And the tools that deliver on that original promise—without asking you to draw the map for them—will be the ones that define the future of cybersecurity.
Graham Rance is the Field CTO at CyCognito. With more than 20+ years of security and infrastructure experience, Graham and his team are responsible for technical pre-sales responsibilities covering the globe.
Download the report now to stay ahead of emerging threats and strengthen your organization’s security posture for 2024.
Download the report to learn about the historical trends behind the emergence of exposure management, how to develop a strategic plan and assemble a team to smoothly transition frameworks, and example tech stacks to consider for your organization.
Get a free scan of your attack surface and gain valuable insight into your organization's risk posture by allowing CyCognito to discover, contextualize, and test externally exposed assets on a portion of your parent company or a single subsidiary.
Discover insights on application security, exposure management and other key topics below.
The definitive guide to attack surface management. Learn everything you need to know to reduce your cyber security risk with attack surface management.
Exposure management is a set of processes which allow organizations to assess the visibility, accessibility, and risk factors of their digital assets.
Vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing vulnerabilities in a system.
Explore CyCognito modules ASM, AST and EI in the resources below.
Scalable, continuous, and comprehensive testing for all external assets, all the time.
CyCognito Automated Security Testing dynamically applies payload-based testing techniques across your entire external attack surface.
CyCognito Exploit Intelligence uses threat intelligence about attackers’ behavior and exploitability for enhanced prioritization.