As the digital perimeter continues to dissolve, security leaders are rethinking how they manage cyber risk. Penetration testing and vulnerability management remain essential—but they’re no longer enough on their own. Today’s attackers exploit what lies beyond your defined scope: misconfigured cloud buckets, forgotten subdomains, exposed APIs, and rogue SaaS apps.
To stay ahead, organizations need not just testing, but visibility. That’s where continuous Attack Surface Management (ASM) comes in.
Penetration testing plays a crucial role in any mature cybersecurity program. It simulates real-world attacks to validate defensive controls, assess the potential impact of breaches, and expose weaknesses that automated tools might miss. Penetration tests are also key for demonstrating compliance, stress-testing incident response protocols, and identifying high-impact vulnerabilities in known environments.
But these tests are, by design, point-in-time. They are scoped engagements that reflect the conditions of your environment during a specific window. If an unknown asset spins up the day after your test concludes, no one is watching—except your adversaries.
Penetration tests are critical not just for uncovering overlooked vulnerabilities, but also for validating how an organization would respond in a breach scenario. As DomainGuard cofounder Erkin Djindjiev often emphasizes, they show how real-world threat actors could exploit those gaps—not just that the gaps exist.
Attack Surface Management is the continuous process of discovering, monitoring, and assessing internet-facing assets—including domains, subdomains, APIs, cloud storage, VPN portals, and more. It captures not just the known, but the unknown and unmanaged components of your digital footprint.
ASM helps you:
ASM fills the gap between reactive scanning and high-effort testing. Vulnerability management uncovers what’s already known. Penetration testing reveals what could go wrong. But ASM exposes the assets and exposures no one saw coming—often before attackers do.
Penetration testing and ASM are not redundant. In fact, they work best together:
We’ve seen customers maintain annual penetration testing schedules, complemented by ongoing ASM. By continuously validating and addressing exploitable issues between scheduled tests, they are turning visibility into real protection.
Getting started with ASM doesn’t require a major investment upfront. Begin by:
Over time, this process can be automated and integrated with platforms that offer continuous monitoring, ticketing, and reporting. ASM not only enhances your penetration testing and vulnerability management programs but also strengthens audit readiness and supports compliance with standards such as CIS, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001.
There is no silver bullet in cybersecurity—only layered strategies. Penetration testing remains indispensable, but it thrives when complemented by continuous visibility into your attack surface. ASM offers proactive insight to discover what you didn’t know existed. Continuous testing shows you what could go wrong if you don’t act.
You need both discovery and validation to stay ahead. ASM provides early visibility into exposures, but without validation—whether through internal testing or an external partner—there’s no way to confirm the true risk. Combined, these efforts help organizations move from reactive remediation to proactive protection. And in today’s threat environment, that’s the visibility every executive needs to protect their company.
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