These 6 Questions Will Help You Choose The Best Attack Surface Management Platform
The excitement around multiple security categories can make it difficult to distinguish features and capabilities from bias when researching a new platform. You want to improve your security measures, but what steps actually make sense for your business?
For anyone who is ready to find a surface attack management (ASM) vendors.review these six questions before starting to understand the key features to look for in an ASM platform and the quality of the vendors that support them.
Refer to this as your quick guide to interviewing vendors to go with the most suitable ASM platform for your needs.
Checklist: 6 Questions to Ask an Attack Surface Management Vendor
- Does your platform have the ability to discover the unknown?
- How do you prevent warning exhaustion, prioritize alerts, and remove false positives?
- Can you track changes in the attack surface over time?
- How do you plan to develop the platform going forward?
- What services related to ASM do you offer?
- Can we demo or test the platform?
Let’s dive deeper into each.
1. Does your platform have the ability to discover unknown assets?
Creating an asset inventory is always challenging. Attack surface management tools can have limited capabilities focusing solely on identifying known assets, such as known IP addresses, domains, software, and other resources. However, some of today’s best attack surface management platforms have the ability to discover and protect known and unknown internet-facing assets, which has become a critical requirement for an effective ASM tool.
2. How do you prevent alert burnout, prioritize alerts, and remove false positives?
Asset discovery with attack surface management is what’s at stake. Prioritizing alerts to focus remediation efforts is its true value.
Top ASM tools address alert fatigue by incorporating human vulnerability analysis in the client’s business context. This method means the client receives focused fix efforts only on high-severity vulnerabilities, not the more common result of receiving a PDF with an extensive list of warnings.
3. Can you track changes in attack surface over time?
Traditionally, attack surface tracking involves annual or periodic penetration testing. However, this approach lacks the ability to keep up with a rapidly evolving attack surface and threats that can emerge at any time.
Instead of relying on occasional pentesting, organizations can achieve better results by incorporating external network penetration testing continuous attack surface management. This approach allows teams to effectively monitor the growth of their attack surface and identify vulnerabilities as they arise.
4. How do you plan to develop the platform going forward?
Partnerships between ASM vendors and their clients benefit from a collaborative approach to continuously enhance the platform’s capabilities. The best attack surface management vendors actively listen to customers to drive feature development and platform enhancements. Taking their input into account, a dedicated team of software engineers can consistently roll out updates and new features that advance the capabilities of the ASM platform.
5. What services related to ASM do you offer?
For organizations to continue to develop their offensive security strategy, it is beneficial to have features and capabilities that go beyond attack surface management and cover related market categories.
When choosing an ASM platform, you should consider additional capabilities such as Breach and Attack Simulation, Penetration Testing as a Service, and Application Security Testing. These capabilities extend the scope and effectiveness of ASM, enabling organizations to strengthen their overall security posture.
6. Can we demo or test the platform?
Beware of vendors that don’t have demos ready. ASM vendors typically offer on-demand demos of their platforms, as well as helpful how-to resources, and conversations with subject matter experts so you can ensure your business needs are met. Doing a demo before any purchase also allows you to see the UX of the platform and gauge its ease of use. A user-friendly design and an easy-to-digest dashboard are essential for the ASM tools you actually want to use.
Keep these six questions in your back pocket when evaluating attack surface management platforms. The nuances of expanding offensive security measures can make or break engagement, so here’s what you’re looking for in an ASM platform:
- The ability to discover the unknown
- Inclusion of human analysis to prioritize alerts
- Ability to track attack surface changes over time
- Expertise to develop new features based on business needs
- Capabilities beyond ASM into related market categories
- The demo is ready featuring a clean and easy to use UX
See the NetSPI Attack Surface Management platform in action at this on-demand demo.
