What Is Exposure Management And How Does It Differ From ASM?

What is exposure management, how does it differ from attack surface management, and why is it becoming essential to organizations' security programs? Find out all you need to know from Intruder's VP of Product, Andy Hornegold. And if you’d like to hear Andy’s insights first-hand, watch our webinar on exposure management on-demand.

Startups and scaleups are often cloud-first organizations and rarely have sprawling legacy on-prem environments. Similarly, mid-market companies often operate in a hybrid state, partly in the cloud but still retaining some on-premises assets. While there has been a bit of a backswing against the pricing and lock-in presented when using cloud infrastructure, cloud is still the preferred provider for the majority of SMBs.

As a result, external attack surfaces have become more complex and distributed, making them harder to monitor and secure. This expanded attack surface gives hackers plenty of blind spots and gaps to exploit. Security teams are on the backfoot reacting, often too slowly, to changes in their own attack surface as engineering teams continuously spin-up and expose new systems, services, and data to the internet.

This is compounded by a constantly changing threat landscape. Thousands of new vulnerabilities are discovered every month, including vulnerabilities which allow threat actors to gain total control over internet-facing systems intended to support security teams or facilitate secure connections (e.g. the recent Citrix and Ivanti vulnerabilities). How can you react to a new critical vulnerability, that’s being exploited by ransomware gangs, if you don’t even know if your organization is using that technology and exposing it to the internet?

Security teams struggle because processes are reactive and knowledge about the organization’s attack surface is siloed in the heads of those people who are spinning up those cloud systems. Security teams rely on a sprawl of solutions that generate loads of fragmented data that’s difficult to understand, prioritize and action. This is where exposure management fits in as an extension of attack surface management (ASM).

What is exposure management in cybersecurity?

Exposure management (EM) is a set of processes that enable organizations to continually and consistently evaluate the visibility, accessibility, and vulnerability of their digital assets.

You might have also heard the term ‘continuous threat exposure management’ (CTEM). CTEM and EM are essentially the same because exposure management must be continuous to be effective.

Exposure management is an evolution of attack surface management and includes assets beyond just those which have an IP address, such as code repositories, cloud accounts and SaaS products.

The outcome of exposure management is to reduce the risk of an attacker gaining access to your systems and assets by allowing you to address weaknesses or remove any unnecessary assets.  

“Organizations who implement a continuous exposure management program will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026” (Gartner)

Exposure management has been recognized by analysts and industry leaders: Gartner predicts that organizations who implement a continuous exposure management program will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026.

What’s the difference between a vulnerability and an exposure?

A vulnerability is a specific weakness in a single asset that can be exploited. In vulnerability management, we often encounter these as isolated incidents, which can feel like game of whack-a-mole as new vulnerabilities emerge.  

An exposure, on the other hand, provides greater context into how your organization could be breached. As well as vulnerabilities, exposures factor in the priority of your assets and the potential attack paths a threat actor might exploit to reach these assets.  

Why is exposure management important?  

As environments evolve and become more complex, so do the tools and techniques needed to secure and protect them. Exposure management aims to reduce that complexity by giving you visibility of all points within your attack surface that an attacker could use to breach your organization, and ultimately pose a risk to the business.

Exposure management aims to provide a prioritized list of exposures, with context for each so that you can make an informed decision on what to tackle first and how to tackle it to reduce your business risk.

Exposure management can also help increase visibility of your entire attack surface, including data assets such as code repositories like GitHub and GitLab, so you can more accurately find opportunities for an attacker and shut them down before they pose too great of a risk to your business.

This means you can better understand the risks you face, and prioritize the attacks that are not just more likely, but more serious. At a time when security teams are overwhelmed with data – over 25,000 vulnerabilities were published in 2022 and we saw that increase to over 26,500 in 2023 – having a clear picture of where to focus your time and effort is becoming essential.

Exposure management vs attack surface management

While both exposure management and attack surface management have the same goal, there are important differences between the two.

Attack surface management is the ongoing process of discovering and identifying assets which can be seen by an attacker on the internet, showing where security gaps exist, where they can be used to perform an attack, and where defenses are strong enough to repel an attack. If you can scan for it using vulnerability scanning then it generally falls within attack surface management. You can find out more in our essential guide to attack surface management.  

Exposure management takes this a step further to include data assets, user identities, and cloud account configuration, which helps you understand your exposure and reduce it where necessary.

Here, the attack surface includes any of the SaaS products you use. If one of these products or one of your accounts with a SaaS provider gets compromised, the information could be used to facilitate other attacks. So SaaS products shouldn’t be forgotten when assessing risk to the business.

Another difference is that, while ASM tries to identify all potential vulnerabilities across your attack surface, exposure management introduces the idea of scoping where you identify the assets that support the business' short, medium, and long-term objectives and prioritize your efforts against risks that impact those assets. Exposure management acknowledges that trying to fix everything is inefficient, so it prioritizes efforts that will have the greatest impact on the business.

How to get started with exposure management

Exposure management is an emerging framework that no organization has perfected yet.

However, if you're working to secure your assets, you're already on a journey towards effective exposure management, whether in the early stages with vulnerability scanning or further along with attack surface management. And if you're optimizing these processes and aligning outcomes with business objectives, you are likely in a strong position.

Get a deep dive on how to build an exposure management program by watching the video below.

Visualize and minimize your exposure with Intruder

Remember what we said about a large attack surface being harder to defend? You can reduce yours by discovering your attack surface and continuously monitoring for changes with Intruder:

• Discover assets: find assets across your organization, including subdomains, login pages, APIs, exposed services, and more. When new cloud services are spun up and exposed to the internet, we’ll kick off a scan to find any vulnerabilities so you can fix them faster.

• Know what’s exposed: get complete visibility of your attack surface, track active and unresponsive targets, identify changes, monitor expiring certificates, and see any ports, services or protocols that shouldn’t be exposed to the internet.

• Detect more: we use multiple scanners to provide better coverage than any other attack surface management platform.

• Focus on the big issues: we prioritize results based on context, including exploit data powered by machine learning, so you can focus on the most pressing problems without wasting time sifting through the noise.

Want a deeper dive into exposure management and your attack surface? Watch our webinar on the topic. Looking to get started with ASM and exposure management? Book some time to chat with us.