Explore effective strategies and learn how organizations can enhance Attack Surface Management using artificial intelligence (AI) automation. Read more.
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Vincent Thiele
Deputy CISO
Share
09
Jun 2021
Effective attack surface management breaks down into four key parts:
Discovery
Assessment and prioritisation
Risk prevention
Integration
Discovery
The most important part of any attack surface management process is the discovery phase. As we’ve mentioned previously, most organizations miss as much as 30 to 50 percent of their true attack surface. This creates huge blind spots when it comes to understanding the real risks your organization is facing. In fact, we believe that something like 80% of all organizations’ cybersecurity problems exist due to blind spots in their attack surface. Eliminating those blind spots should be your core goal when setting out to discover your attack surface.
One of the biggest contributing factors to these blind spots is scoping. Organizations tend to work within a predefined scope when it comes to discovery – whether that’s within a defined IT infrastructure or a set of IP addresses that the organization uses and wants to protect.
However, the reality is that any would-be attackers out there do not care about your scope. Whether you have a vulnerability in-house, via an external supplier, or in a cloud environment; an attacker will find it and try to misuse it.
On top of this, with modern organizations having so many external dependencies, regulatory bodies are starting to insist that financial services companies look beyond the boundaries of their own networks when analysing risk.
For example, the Digital Operational Resilience of the financial sector (DORA), extends the focus of risk management to cover all external assets of the parties they have relationships with (such as fourth and fifth parties, or parties that you even don't know you have a relationship with), as well as any services and infrastructure that can impact on the organization’s day-to-day resilience.
Taking a zero-scope approach to your attack surface is therefore essential. This means that tracking down the full extent of your attack surface is not something that can be left to human endeavour. Relying on people to trace and discover your connections would be hugely expensive, time consuming, and error prone. So, a prerequisite of effective discovery is automation. AI and algorithmic-based discovery is the only way to uncover the bulk of your attack surface.
Assessment and Prioritization
Monitoring your attack surface is not a one-time, set-and-forget process because your attack surface is not static; it’s constantly evolving and changing. This means you need to be continuously monitoring it for changes, and you need to be alerted when those changes occur, so that you can decide whether or not something needs your attention. This data needs to be dynamic and as close to real-time as you can get.Only once you know what your full attack surface looks like can you really start to analyse the risk types presented to the business. These risks can be extensive and need prioritisation according to the threat presented to the brand. As the discovery process continues, you need an automated risk assessment tool to save time and effort. It will tell you what the most pressing risks are, so you can focus on the mitigating process. Then, even when the discovery process is ongoing, new risks are automatically reported on, and added to right lists. This ensures you stay up-to-date on the actual risks to the organization – removing a lot of the stress from the process for CISOs.
Risk Prevention
There is a flipside to seeing your whole attack surface. Having a comprehensive overview of every risk your organization faces can be terrifying – you are going to uncover a multitude of things you’d never considered. This can leave you facing one big question: “Do I really want to know all of this?” Most CISOs and cybersecurity professionals are already busy with all the things they do know about, so you need to have a way of striping out and solving some of the possibly lower priority but easier to solve risks in your report. This is again where automation can come into play. Automatically categorizing similar risk types throughout your attack surface will save time and effort when reducing risks.
Integration
Finally, it doesn’t matter how much data you have on something; if it’s not actionable it’s ultimately not going to be practical to use. So you need to be able to connect all that data coming from your attack surface monitoring into your existing internal processes and systems (your PSA, ITSM, or ESM tools etc). That way you can build it into your existing cybersecurity structure and minimise extra work.
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Patch Smarter, Not Harder: Now Empowering Security Teams with Business-Aligned Threat Context Agents
Most risk management programs remain anchored in enumeration: scanning every asset, cataloging every CVE, and drowning in lists that rarely translate into action. Despite expensive scanners, annual pen tests, and countless spreadsheets, prioritization still falters at two critical points.
Context gaps at the device level: It’s hard to know which vulnerabilities actually matter to your business given existing privileges, what software it runs, and what controls already reduce risk.
Business translation: Even when the technical priority is clear, justifying effort and spend in financial terms—especially across many affected devices—can delay action. Especially if it means halting other areas of the business that directly generate revenue.
The result is familiar: alert fatigue, “too many highs,” and remediation that trails behind the threat landscape. Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management addresses this by pairing precise, endpoint‑level context with clear, financial insight so teams can prioritize confidently and mobilize faster.
A powerful combination: No-Telemetry Endpoint Agent + Cost-Benefit Analysis
Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management now uniquely combines technical precision with business clarity in a single workflow. With this release, Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management delivers a more holistic approach, uniting technical context and financial insight to drive proactive risk reduction. The result is a single solution that helps security teams stay ahead of threats while reducing noise, delays, and complexity.
No-Telemetry Endpoint: Collects installed software data and maps it to known CVEs—without network traffic—providing device-level vulnerability context and operational relevance.
Cost-Benefit Analysis for Patching: Calculates ROI by comparing patching effort with potential exploit impact, factoring in headcount time, device count, patch difficulty, and automation availability.
Introducing the No-Telemetry Endpoint Agent
Darktrace’s new endpoint agent inventories installed software on devices and maps it to known CVEs without collecting network data so you can prioritize using real device context and available security controls.
By grounding vulnerability findings in the reality of each endpoint, including its software footprint and existing controls, teams can cut through generic severity scores and focus on what matters most. The agent is ideal for remote devices, BYOD-adjacent fleets, or environments standardizing on Darktrace, and is available without additional licensing cost.
Figure 1: Darktrace / Proactive Exposure Management user interface
Built-In Cost-Benefit Analysis for Patching
Security teams often know what needs fixing but stakeholders need to understand why now. Darktrace’s new cost-benefit calculator compares the total cost to patch against the potential cost of exploit, producing an ROI for the patch action that expresses security action in clear financial terms.
Inputs like engineer time, number of affected devices, patch difficulty, and automation availability are factored in automatically. The result is a business-aligned justification for every patching decision—helping teams secure buy-in, accelerate approvals, and move work forward with one-click ticketing, CSV export, or risk acceptance.
Together, the no-telemetry endpoint and Cost–Benefit Analysis advance the CTEM motion from theory to practice. You gain higher‑fidelity discovery and validation signals at the device level, paired with business‑ready justification that accelerates mobilization. The result is fewer distractions, clearer priorities, and faster measurable risk reduction. This is not from chasing every alert, but by focusing on what moves the needle now.
Smarter Prioritization: Device‑level context trims noise and spotlights the exposures that matter for your business.
Faster Decisions: Built‑in ROI turns technical urgency into executive clarity—speeding approvals and action.
Practical Execution: Privacy‑conscious endpoint collection and ticketing/export options fit neatly into existing workflows.
Better Outcomes: Close the loop faster—discover, prioritize, validate, and mobilize—on the same operating surface.
Committed to innovation
These updates are part of the broader Darktrace release, which also included:
3. Improvements to our OT product, purpose built for industrial infrastructure, Darktrace / OT now brings dedicated OT dashboard, segmentation-aware risk modeling, and expanded visibility into edge assets and automation protocols.
Join our live broadcast to experience how Darktrace is eliminating blind spots for detection and response across your complete enterprise with new innovations in Agentic AI across our ActiveAI Security platform. Industry leaders from IDC will join Darktrace customers to discuss challenges in cross-domain security, with a live walkthrough reshaping the future of Network Detection & Response, Endpoint Detection & Response, Email Security, and SecOps in novel threat detection and autonomous investigations.
Darktrace Announces Extended Visibility Between Confirmed Assets and Leaked Credentials from the Deep and Dark Web
Why exposure management needs to evolve beyond scans and checklists
The modern attack surface changes faster than most security programs can keep up. New assets appear, environments change, and adversaries are increasingly aided by automation and AI. Traditional approaches like periodic scans, static inventories, or annual pen tests are no longer enough. Without a formal exposure program, many businesses are flying blind, unaware of where the next threat may emerge.
This is where Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) becomes essential. Introduced by Gartner, CTEM helps organizations continuously assess, validate, and improve their exposure to real-world threats. It reframes the problem: scope your true attack surface, prioritize based on business impact and exploitability, and validate what attackers can actually do today, not once a year.
With two powerful new capabilities, Darktrace / Attack Surface Management helps organizations evolve their CTEM programs to meet the demands of today’s threat landscape. These updates make CTEM a reality, not just a strategy.
Too much data, not enough direction
Modern Attack Surface Management tools excel at discovering assets such as cloud workloads, exposed APIs, and forgotten domains. But they often fall short when it comes to prioritization. They rely on static severity scores or generic CVSS ratings, which do not reflect real-world risk or business impact.
This leaves security teams with:
Alert fatigue from hundreds of “critical” findings
Patch paralysis due to unclear prioritization
Blind spots around attacker intent and external targeting
CISOs need more than visibility. They need confidence in what to fix first and context to justify those decisions to stakeholders.
Evolving Attack Surface Management
Attack Surface Management (ASM) must evolve from static lists and generic severity scores to actionable intelligence that helps teams make the right decision now.
Exploit Prediction Assessment: Continuously validates whether top-priority exposures are actually exploitable in your environment without waiting for patch cycles or formal pen tests.
Deep & Dark Web Monitoring: Extends visibility across millions of sources in the deep and dark web to detect leaked credentials linked to your confirmed domains.
Confidence Score: our newly developed AI classification platform will compare newly discovered assets to assets that are known to belong to your organization. The more these newly discovered assets look similar to assets that belong to your organization, the higher the score will be.
Together, these features compress the window from discovery to decision, so your team can act with precision, not panic. The result is a single solution that helps teams stay ahead of attackers without introducing new complexities.
Exploit Prediction Assessment
Traditional penetration tests are invaluable, but they’re often a snapshot of that point-in-time, are potentially disruptive, and compliance frameworks still expect them. Not to mention, when vulnerabilities are present, teams can act immediately rather than relying solely on information from CVSS scores or waiting for patch cycles.
Unlike full pen tests which can be obtrusive and are usually done only a couple times per year, Exploit Prediction Assessment is surgical, continuous, and focused only on top issues Instead of waiting for vendor patches or the next pen‑test window. It helps confirm whether a top‑priority exposure is actually exploitable in your environment right now.
Customers have been asking for this for years, and it is finally here. Defense against the dark web. Darktrace / Attack Surface Management’s reach now spans millions of sources across the deep and dark web including forums, marketplaces, breach repositories, paste sites, and other hard‑to‑reach communities to detect leaked credentials linked to your confirmed domains.
Monitoring is continuous, so you’re alerted as soon as evidence of compromise appears. The surface web is only a fraction of the internet, and a sizable share of risk hides beyond it. Estimates suggest the surface web represents roughly ~10% of all online content, with the rest gated or unindexed—and the TOR-accessible dark web hosts a high proportion of illicit material (a King’s College London study found ~57% of surveyed onion sites contained illicit content), underscoring why credential leakage and brand abuse often appear in places traditional monitoring doesn’t reach. Making these spaces high‑value for early warning signals when credentials or brand assets appear. Most notably, this includes your company’s reputation, assets like servers and systems, and top executives and employees at risk.
What changes for your team
Before:
Hundreds of findings, unclear what to start with
Reactive investigations triggered by incidents
After:
A prioritized backlog based on confidence score or exploit prediction assessment verification
Proactive verification of exposure with real-world risk without manual efforts
Confidence Score: Prioritize based on the use-case you care most about
What is it?
Confidence Score is a metric that expresses similarity of newly discover assets compared to the confirmed asset inventory. Several self-learning algorithms compare features of assets to be able to calculate a score.
Why it matters
Traditional Attack Surface Management tools treat all new discovery equally, making it unclear to your team how to identify the most important newly discovered assets, potentially causing you to miss a spoofing domain or shadow IT that could impact your business.
How it helps your team
We’re dividing newly discovered assets into separate insight buckets that each cover a slightly different business case.
Low scoring assets: to cover phishing & spoofing domains (like domain variants) that are just being registered and don't have content yet.
Medium scoring assets: have more similarities to your digital estate, but have better matching to HTML, brand names, keywords. Can still be phishing but probably with content.
High scoring assets: These look most like the rest of your confirmed digital estate, either it's phishing that needs the highest attention, or the asset belongs to your attack surface and requires asset state confirmation to enable the platform to monitor it for risks.
Smarter Exposure Management for CTEM Programs
Recent updates to Darktrace / Attack Surface Management directly advance the core phases of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM): scope, discover, prioritize, validate, and mobilize. The new Exploit Prediction Assessment helps teams validate and prioritize vulnerabilities based on real-world exploitability, while Deep & Dark Web Monitoring extends discovery into hard-to-reach areas where stolen data and credentials often surface. Together, these capabilities reduce noise, accelerate remediation, and help organizations maintain continuous visibility over their expanding attack surface.
Building on these innovations, Darktrace / Attack Surface Management empowers security teams to focus on what truly matters. By validating exploitability, it cuts through the noise of endless vulnerability lists—helping defenders concentrate on exposures that represent genuine business risk. Continuous monitoring for leaked credentials across the deep and dark web further extends visibility beyond traditional asset discovery, closing critical blind spots where attackers often operate. Crucially, these capabilities complement, not replace, existing security controls such as annual penetration tests, providing continuous, low-friction validation between formal assessments. The result is a more adaptive, resilient security posture that keeps pace with an ever-evolving threat landscape.
If you’re building or maturing a CTEM program—and want fewer open exposures, faster remediation, and better outcomes, Darktrace / Attack Surface Management’s new Exploit Prediction Assessment and Deep & Dark Web Monitoring are ready to help.
3. Improvements to our OT product, purpose built for industrial infrastructure, Darktrace / OT now brings dedicated OT dashboard, segmentation-aware risk modeling, and expanded visibility into edge assets and automation protocols.
Join our live broadcast to experience how Darktrace is eliminating blind spots for detection and response across your complete enterprise with new innovations in Agentic AI across our ActiveAI Security platform. Industry leaders from IDC will join Darktrace customers to discuss challenges in cross-domain security, with a live walkthrough reshaping the future of Network Detection & Response, Endpoint Detection & Response, Email Security, and SecOps in novel threat detection and autonomous investigations.
