Make sure the windows are closed before you leave the house. Go back to the kitchen and make sure the oven and stove are definitely off. Maybe go back and go back again to make sure your front door is properly closed. Don’t worry, as you know these automatic safety checks are unlikely to forget, but potentially dangerous consequences: intrusions, fires, or even worse.
Your external IT infrastructure deserves the same systematic attention. External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection (DRP) tools provide the same peace of mind to your digital “home” and automate daily safety checks that hinder costly incidents.
Why do external IT infrastructures require the same care?
Just like securing a physical home before you leave, assets exposed to the internet need consistent safety protocols. Think of it like this:
Lock door = Lock down exposed assets and ensure that only authorized access points remain open. Turn off the oven = Unlock unused assets and isolated services that continue to consume resources while expanding the attack surface.
But there is one major difference. Although your home has physical limitations, the attack surface of your organization can span multiple providers, regions and development teams, making manual verification almost impossible. Forgotten cloud instances or misunderstood storage buckets, abandoned servers, or some development environments can expose sensitive data for the months prior to discovery.
Hidden assets that awaken your security team at night
The development team spins up the test servers, and DevOps engineers create temporary endpoints that grow across the department. Without autodiscovery, these assets will be invisible until the attacker first finds them. This makes it difficult to monitor the vulnerability CMDB-based and attack surfaces. This is because you can never be sure that all exposed assets will be considered. EASM solutions continuously map assets for the Internet and discover resources that may have existed.
Consider a typical scenario. Developers create staging environments to test new features with snapshots of production data. They complete the project and move on to other priorities, but the staging server remains online. EASM uses automated reconnaissance to identify this isolated asset before it becomes a security incident. Scan the entire external footprint to find that the forgotten development server, open ports that were closed after testing, and subdomains point to deprecated services.
Threats are hiding beyond your firewall
While EASM focuses on asset discovery, DRP addresses the different but equally important challenges of monitoring external threats that challenge organizations, whether on Facebook or the dark web. Finding all assets is knowing that criminals post leaked credentials for sale, discussing planned attacks on infrastructure, or impersonating brands online.
The DRP platform continuously scans external channels such as social media sites, underground forums, and data leak sites to mention your organization, providing immediate alerts when threats are detected.
Figure 1: Data leak summary example, within the CompassDRP platform of Outpost24.
These external threats occur gradually, but can explode soon. For example, dissatisfied employees may intentionally leak sensitive documents to file sharing sites, and hackers start selling access to the system on dark web forums. Without continuous surveillance, threats can continue to grow and gain momentum before they realize they exist.
Early detection tools act like smoke alarms for your organization’s reputation and cybersecurity attitude. It will give you something wrong – hopefully it will cause damage or the threat will no longer be suppressed. The DRP platform helps you detect when cybercriminals discuss your company on attack forums, and create fake social media profiles using the brand of phishing campaigns. These early warnings allow you to respond quickly, protect your customers and mitigate threats.
Figure 2: Details of ransomware groups running on Dark Web using Outpost24’s CompassDRP platform.
Build “Did I leave anything?” Security ritual
You need to develop operational habits around EASM and DRP, as you develop routines to check your home before you leave. Set up a summary of your daily or weekly scans based on a continuous scan of a tool that answers persistent questions: “Did I leave anything?” By generating these reports regularly, you can represent newly discovered assets, configuration changes, and potential risks that require attention.
Beauty is not reactive, it is about making security systematic. Review high-risk items, quickly approve legitimate resources, and shut down unnecessary resources. Instead of scrambling to find forgotten infrastructure after an incident or patch alert, prevent risk buildup before it becomes an issue.
Better yet, these insights can be integrated into both your existing cybersecurity technology stack and your change management workflow. When you make infrastructure changes, EASM validates the external footprint and DRP maintains the configuration within acceptable parameters. Also, remember that the tool must automatically create an audit trail so that it can demonstrate due diligence without any additional documentation.
Track changes
Additionally, it quantifies security improvements to justify your continued investment in manageable dashboards and customized reports. Track metrics such as how many “virtual ovens” turned off, how long to detect and respond to orphan services, and how long to fix critical vulnerabilities. These measurements help demonstrate the effectiveness of the program while identifying areas for improvement.
Figure 3: Tracking the threat and vulnerability situation within a single dashboard.
Also, understand how automated alerts and customizable workflows prioritize your attention on the most important issues. Rather than overwhelming you with every asset discovered, it highlights filtering and summaries powered by intelligent AI. The system learns from your responses and reduces false positives while maintaining sensitivity to legitimate threats.
Attacks surface management for peace of mind
Whether it’s a physical oven or a misunderstood cloud service, the comfort of knowing nothing is being monitored comes from verification, not just wanting the best. EASM and DRP tools help automate essentially aggressive safety monitoring steps that prevent costly security incidents.
Solutions such as Outpost24’s CompassDRP combine EASM capabilities with comprehensive digital risk protection and threat intelligence to provide continuous visibility across the entire digital footprint and associated risks. Get automated asset discovery and threat intelligence-based risk prioritization on a single platform, allowing you to focus on addressing business risks.
Start building continuous external attack surfaces and digital risk management now – book the CompassDrp demo.
Source link
