You check that the windows are shut before leaving home. Return to the kitchen to verify that the oven and stove were definitely turned off. Maybe even circle back again to confirm the front door was properly closed. These automatic safety checks give you peace of mind because you know the unlikely but potentially dangerous consequences of forgetting – a break-in, fire, or worse.
Your external-facing IT infrastructure deserves the same methodical attention. External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection (DRP) tools provide that same peace of mind for your digital “home,” automating the everyday safety checks that prevent costly incidents.
Why does the external-facing IT infrastructure need the same care?
Just as you secure your physical home prior to leaving, your assets that are exposed to the internet require consistent safety protocols. Think about it this way:
- Locking doors = locking down exposed assets, ensuring only authorized access points remain open.
- Turning off the oven = de-provisioning unused assets and orphaned services that continue consuming resources while expanding your attack surface.
But there is one major difference: your home has physical limits, but your organization’s attack surface can span multiple providers, regions, and development teams, making manual verification nearly impossible. A forgotten cloud instance or misconfigured storage bucket, an abandoned server, or some dev-environment can expose sensitive data for months before discovery.
The hidden assets that keep security teams awake at night
Development teams spin up test servers, DevOps engineers create temporary endpoints, and shadow IT proliferates across departments. Without automated discovery, these assets become invisible until attackers find them first. This makes CMDB-based monitoring of your vulnerabilities and attack surface difficult, as one can never be sure that all exposed assets are accounted for. EASM solutions continuously map your internet-facing assets, discovering resources you may have forgotten existed.
Consider the typical scenario: a developer creates a staging environment for testing new features, complete with a snapshot 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 orphaned asset before it becomes a security incident – scanning your entire external footprint to find forgotten development servers, open ports that should have been closed after testing, and subdomains pointing to decommissioned services.
The threats lurking beyond your firewall
While EASM focuses on asset discovery, DRP tackles a different but equally important challenge: monitoring external threats that challenge your organization, whether on Facebook or the dark web. Finding all your assets is only half the battle, knowing when criminals are posting leaked credentials for sale, discussing planned attacks against your infrastructure, or impersonating your brand online is the other half.
DRP platforms continuously scan external channels like social media sites, underground forums, and data leak sites for mentions of your organization, providing immediate alerts when threats are detected.
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| Figure 1: Example View of data leakage overview within Outpost24’s CompassDRP platform. |
These external threats develop gradually but can explode quickly. For example, a disgruntled employee may intentionally leak sensitive documents to file-sharing sites, or a hacker may start selling access to your systems on dark web forums. Without ongoing monitoring, threats can continue to grow and gain momentum before you realize they exist.
Early detection tools work like a smoke alarm for your organization’s reputation and cybersecurity posture. It gives you a heads up that something is wrong – hopefully before damage can be caused or the threat can no longer be contained. DRP platforms help detect when cybercriminals discuss your company in attack forums or create fake social media profiles using your branding for phishing campaigns. These early warnings let you immediately respond, protecting your customers and mitigating the threat.
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| Figure 2: Example details of a ransomware group operating on the dark web with Outpost24’s CompassDRP platform. |
Building a “Did I leave anything on?” security ritual
Just like you develop a routine for checking your home before leaving, you need to build operational habits around EASM and DRP. Set up daily or weekly scan summaries based on the continuous scans of the tools that answer that nagging question: “Did I leave anything on?” Regularly generating these reports ensures you can surface newly discovered assets, configuration changes, and potential risks that need your attention.
The beauty lies in making your security systematic rather than reactive. You review high-risk items, quickly approving legitimate resources or shutting down unnecessary ones. Instead of scrambling to find forgotten infrastructure after an incident or patch alert, you prevent the accumulation of risk before it becomes a problem.
Better yet, you can integrate these insights both into your existing Cybersecurity tech-stack as well as any change management workflows. When you make infrastructure changes, EASM validates your external footprint while DRP ensures configurations stay within acceptable parameters. And keep in mind that the tool should automatically create audit trails so that you can demonstrate due diligence without extra paperwork.
Keeping track of changes
Additionally, quantify your security improvements to justify continued investment in easy-to-manage dashboards and customized reports. Track metrics like the number of “virtual ovens” you’ve turned off, your time to detect and react to orphaned services, and your time to remediate critical vulnerabilities. These measurements will help you demonstrate program effectiveness while identifying areas for improvement.
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| Figure 3: Keep track of your threat and vulnerability landscape within one dashboard. |
You’ll also appreciate how automated alerts and customizable workflows prioritize your attention on the most critical issues. Rather than overwhelming you with every discovered asset, intelligent, AI-powered filtering and summaries highlight genuine risks that require your immediate action. The system learns from your responses, reducing false positives while maintaining sensitivity to legitimate threats.
Attack Surface Management for peace of mind
The comfort of knowing nothing’s left unmonitored – whether a physical oven or a misconfigured cloud service – comes from verification, not just hoping for the best. EASM and DRP tools help automate the essential proactive safety monitoring steps that prevent costly security incidents.
Solutions like Outpost24’s CompassDRP combine EASM capabilities with comprehensive Digital Risk Protection and Threat Intelligence, giving you continuous visibility across your entire digital footprint and the risks associated with it. You get automated asset discovery and threat intelligence-based risk prioritization in a single platform, letting you focus on addressing business-critical risks.
Start building a continuous external attack surface and digital risk management today – book your CompassDRP demo.
