Glossary

External Attack Surface Management (EASM) is an emerging market category that Gartner created in March 2021 to describe a set of products that supports organizations in identifying risks coming from internet-facing assets and systems that they may be unaware of.

EASM solutions continuously discover, classify and assess the security of your internet-exposed attack surface from the outside in. EASM provides a view of an organization’s IT assets, as well as those closely related to the organization, as seen by attackers looking at the organization from the outside. For this reason, EASM excels at finding “unknown unknowns.”

Attack surface protection solutions build on that concept and combine the market’s most advanced External Attack Surface Management capabilities with automated multi-factor testing, to discover the paths of least resistance that attackers are most likely to use to compromise organizations.

Ethical hacking is a form of offensive security that involves authorized attempts to break into systems and applications in order to test an organization’s security posture. One example of ethical hacking is penetration testing.