The expansion of your attack surface is inevitable. As your business grows, so does the need to leverage API integrations and third-party tooling to ensure your product remains competitive. But what about ensuring that your product remains secure?
The proportion of breaches involving supply chain interconnection increased by 68% between 2023 and 2024. Attackers are not just interested in your data – they are after the weak links in your interconnected systems.
As a company, you can’t stop growing simply to avoid risks. What you can do, however, is employ a solution that enables you to protect every asset against external threats, safeguarding your systems and data in the long term.
What is External Attack Surface Management (EASM)?
EASM is a cybersecurity strategy that identifies and mitigates potential threats to a company’s digital assets that originate outside the organization. These include phishing targeting customers or external parties and fraud through brand impersonation techniques such as clone phishing.
EASM solutions continuously monitor a company’s external attack surface, including websites, domains, and social media accounts, to identify potential vulnerabilities and threats before they cause harm. While not a standalone measure, EASM helps companies understand their environment as enterprise attack surfaces expand.
Types of EASM tools
There are several types of EASM tools available, each designed to help users with different challenges:
- Brand monitoring tools collect and analyze content across digital channels to detect potential brand abuse (such as fake domains and social media accounts created illegitimately under the brand’s name).
- Website security tools can help users protect their websites from unauthorized access and attacks, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).
- Email security tools help users protect their email systems from phishing and spoofing attacks. Most email protection tools monitor emails coming into the network using algorithms to parse for known malicious attachments, suspicious URL links, and malware. Some also feature virus and malware blocking, spam filtering, content filtering, and email archiving to help prevent users from opening and clicking on malicious content.
- API security tools help to protect applications from external threats by monitoring and controlling their access through APIs. Users can leverage them to identify and block suspicious requests to prevent data breaches.
While these solutions alone may not address all EASM challenges, combining them as part of an EASM strategy is common.
Key features to look for in an EASM tool
When selecting an EASM tool, it is essential to consider the specific needs of your organization and look for the following features:
- Automatic inventory generation of exposed assets
- Insights into business context and ability to understand the connections of each asset to the core network
- Automatic asset classification to improve visibility
- Automated, continuous monitoring to ensure compliance
- Risk prioritization and vulnerability management to assess supply chain risk
- Real-time alerts and reporting for swift action
These features can help organizations discover, manage, and monitor their perimeter-less network at scale, providing visibility into their attack surface, reducing the risks associated with limited attack surface visibility, and improving the organization’s overall security posture.
10 Top EASM Tools for 2024
1. CrowdStrike Falcon Surface
CrowdStrike’s flagship product, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, offers a range of security capabilities for endpoint protection, threat intelligence, and incident response.
Main features
- Enables complete visibility into the external attack surface
- Monitors and maps all internet-facing assets
- Provides actionable insights and guidance for security teams to reduce risk and prevent breaches
Best for
- Proactively preventing external attacks and maintaining compliance.
Review: “CrowdStrike was quick to install and easy to use, and feedback from staff was super positive. Most importantly, the product showed it could solve one of our main challenges: visibility of the technological environment.”
2. Memcyco
Memcyco’s Digital Risk Protection solutions enable businesses to protect against various external digital threats, including account takeover (ATO) fraud and brand scams. Memcyco’s advanced nano-defender technology detects fake websites in real time, allowing businesses to mitigate the impacts of digital attacks and protect their customers. This, in turn, helps them avoid data theft, financial loss, weakened customer trust, and potential legal consequences.
Main features
- Real-time alerts when a fake website is spotted
- Granular insights and behavior analytics to track attackers
- Customer data protection through decoy data and alerts
Best for
- Proactively preventing brand impersonation attacks.
Review “Memcyco provides alerts about suspicious activities, which are invaluable to us and our students in avoiding attacks. This is the only solution we know of that can make our users aware in real time that they are accessing an impostor site.”
3. Suridata
Suridata is a SaaS security solution that offers a unified way to scan and detect any SaaS-related vulnerabilities. With organizations increasingly dependent on SaaS apps, tools like Suridata provide automated, continuous deep scans across every system layer. It detects security misconfigurations and other gaps in real time, strengthening your security posture and helping your SaaS compliance efforts.
Main features
- SaaS security posture management
- Real-time threat detection and response
- Complete protection across all SaaS apps
Best for
- Companies that don’t yet have a solution for SaaS-specific vulnerabilities.
Review: “Suridata understands the business and prioritizes the risks based on its impact and severity. This helped us make better decisions for the organization.”
4. FireCompass
FireCompass is an EASM software that provides risk context and actionable information about known and unknown Internet-facing assets for security risk managers. It is also a SaaS platform for Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART).
Main features
- Discovers and compiles inventories on external-facing digital assets
- Automates continuous risk management assessment
- Daily risk port scanning
Best for
- Organizations heavily dependent on cloud, SaaS, APIs, and third-party services
Review: “To our surprise, the tool has exceeded our expectations in identifying numerous domains and subdomains shown as public but should be private.”
5. ProofPoint
Proofpoint (previously Illusive) is a cyber security solution specializing in Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR). Its human-centric platform helps companies stop human-targeted attacks, prevent impersonation, and mitigate data loss.
Main features
- Discovers and remediates identity vulnerabilities
- Privileged account password protection
- Integrates with other security tools like SIEM and EDR
Best for
- Automating discovery and remediation of identity vulnerabilities
Review: “I feel safe sending emails knowing that we use Proofpoint within our company. We like it because a few have been tested, and Proofpoint seems to “catch” more of the threats than similar products.”
6. Spectral
CheckPoint’s Spectral is a developer-first cloud security platform that allows companies to monitor, classify, and protect their code, assets, and infrastructure for exposed API keys, tokens, credentials, and high-risk security misconfigurations.
Main features
- Automates the process of secret protection at build time without negatively affecting CI/CD productivity
- Seamless integration of playbooks and mitigation policies throughout the SDLC so developers can code with confidence
- Over 2000 detectors to discover and classify data silos
Best for
- Adopting a shift-left DevOps approach by integrating security throughout the SDLC without slowing developers down
Review: “We wanted our data to be as safe as it can, and we recognize code and developers’ work is an area that needs focus… Spectral has automatically identified and surfaced security flaws our company was unaware of, helping us be more secure and avoid operational risks.”
7. Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence
Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence is a data feed that provides advanced analytics and insights into emerging threats, vulnerabilities, and attack techniques. Its rich data comes from Microsoft’s global operations and threat researchers and can aid enterprises in combating phishing attacks, ransomware, and advanced persistent threats (APT), among other sophisticated threats.
Main features
- Continuous threat intelligence
- Enhanced alert investigations to accelerate incident response
- Exports lists of malicious entities, IPs, and domains detected
Best for
- Extending the reach and visibility of existing security investments
Review: “Its ability to analyze threats and inform without requiring user action to trigger manually is amazing. It has a great support for real-time protection.”
8. NetSPI
NetSPI is a cybersecurity company that provides Attack Surface Management (ASM) services to improve visibility, inventory, and understanding of assets and exposures by continuously monitoring and assessing an organization’s attack surface.
Main features
- Asset discovery
- Manual exposure triaging
- Interactive interface for continuous pen-testing
- Real-time summary reports
- Open-source intelligence gathering
Best for
- Companies that experience constant change, such as those involved in mergers and acquisitions or those with a significant number of third-party vendors
- Managing shadow IT and identifying dark web exposures
Review: “From working with NetSPI, my team has demonstrated our ability to prevent, detect, and respond to threats more effectively with the investments in our security stack. We have strengthened our detective controls by better understanding the most likely attack vectors.”
9. Rapid7
Rapid7 is a cybersecurity platform for complete security automation. It enables end-to-end attack surface management, swift vulnerability detection through security testing, and effective incident detection and response.
Main features
- Exposure, attack Surface, and vulnerability management capabilities
- Automation of application security testing
- Cloud-first SIEM solution
Best for
- Breaking down security silos with a unified tool.
Review: “So far, I couldn’t think of anything I dislike about this software. We’ve been using it for about four months, and Rapid7 has already achieved far more than we did in the past few years.”
10. Jit
Jit is an ASPM platform that enables easy integration with various open-source security tools. It functions as a complete DevSecOps control center, allowing you to integrate and automate security testing across your entire SDLC. These capabilities mean you can ensure continuous and comprehensive security across your systems and quickly assess vulnerabilities and their risk in a single interface.
Best for
- Implementing continuous security across the SDLC to improve vulnerability mitigation and detection.
Review: “With Jit, we no longer need to understand and manage a lot of disparate tools––and this is huge! Getting it all in one console is a game-changer.”
Outsmarting External Threats
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) tools are crucial to protecting every entry point from cyber threats, including those that companies don’t even know about. When deciding on a tool to invest in, consider your business goals and the value-add this tool can bring, including additional features for mitigation or advanced analytics.
If you want to protect your digital assets from threats like ATO, brand scams, and other types of digital fraud, Memcyco can help. Memcyco’s Digital Risk Protection solutions let you know in real-time if your website has been cloned for cyber attacks. With Memcyco’s behavioral analysis, you can also identify the attacker’s device and location and mitigate this threat before it launches into a full-scale attack and affects your customers. Digital trust is the foundation of all successful digital businesses. Explore how Memcyco can help you preserve it.
Director of Product Marketing