Attack surface discovery is the process of identifying all internet-facing assets, services, and potential entry points that attackers could target. As organizations adopt cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, and remote work tools, their external attack surface has expanded far beyond traditional network perimeters, often in ways security teams don’t fully understand. Attack surface discovery provides the visibility needed to protect what you can’t see.
Discover Your Unknown Exposures
Flare continuously maps your external attack surface, identifying forgotten assets, shadow IT, and misconfigurations before attackers find them. Combine asset discovery with dark web monitoring for complete visibility.
What Is Attack Surface Discovery?
Attack surface discovery identifies and maps every asset that could serve as an entry point for attackers. This includes the obvious (web servers, VPN gateways, email systems) but also assets that security teams may not know exist: forgotten test environments, shadow IT applications, third-party integrations, and cloud resources spun up outside of normal provisioning processes.
The discovery process typically involves:
Scanning to identify all internet-facing systems associated with an organization’s domains, IP ranges, and cloud environments. This includes physical servers, virtual machines, containers, APIs, and SaaS applications.
Determining what services are running on discovered assets (web servers, databases, remote access tools, administrative interfaces) and what versions are deployed.
Connecting discovered assets back to business units, applications, or teams to establish accountability and context.
Repeating discovery on an ongoing basis to detect new assets as they’re deployed, configuration changes, and assets that should have been decommissioned but remain exposed.
The output is a comprehensive inventory of an organization’s external footprint: the foundation for vulnerability management, risk prioritization, and incident response.
Why Is Attack Surface Discovery Critical Now?
The average enterprise attack surface has grown dramatically over the past five years. Cloud adoption, remote work, third-party integrations, and rapid development cycles have created environments where new assets appear constantly, often without security team visibility or approval.
Stealer Logs Are the #1 Risk to Your Attack Surface
Infostealer malware bypasses your perimeter entirely by harvesting credentials and session data directly from infected endpoints, then selling that access on dark web marketplaces.
What’s in a Stealer Log
- Saved passwords from browsers for VPNs, SSO, SaaS apps, and internal systems
- Active session cookies that bypass MFA completely
- Browser autofill data including addresses and payment cards
- System fingerprints linking credentials to specific devices
- Cryptocurrency wallet files and authentication tokens
Why This Changes Everything
Traditional attack surface discovery finds exposed assets and vulnerabilities. But stealer logs give attackers valid credentials to walk through the front door. Your VPN can be perfectly configured, yet an employee’s infected home device still grants access.
The Window Is Short
Fresh stealer logs are most valuable in their first 24 to 48 hours before credentials are rotated or sessions expire. Continuous monitoring is essential to detect and remediate exposures before attackers exploit them.
Cloud Sprawl: Development teams spin up cloud resources for testing, staging, and production. Without proper governance, these assets accumulate across AWS, Azure, GCP, and other providers. Many are never decommissioned, leaving forgotten databases, exposed storage buckets, and misconfigured services available to attackers.
Shadow IT: Employees adopt SaaS tools, personal devices, and unauthorized applications to solve immediate problems. These assets connect to corporate data and systems but exist outside security controls. A marketing team’s unauthorized analytics platform or a developer’s personal CI/CD pipeline can become an entry point.
Third-Party Risk: Modern organizations depend on vendors, partners, and service providers with privileged access to systems and data. Each integration expands the attack surface in ways that may not be visible through internal scanning alone.
Accelerated Development: DevOps and agile methodologies prioritize speed. New applications, APIs, and microservices deploy continuously. Without discovery processes that match this pace, security teams operate with outdated asset inventories.
The result: most organizations don’t know their complete attack surface. Studies consistently find that enterprises have 30-40% more internet-facing assets than their security teams are aware of. Attackers exploit this gap, scanning for forgotten assets, unpatched services, and misconfigurations that defenders don’t know exist.
How Does Attack Surface Discovery Address Shadow IT and Rogue Assets?
Shadow IT and rogue assets represent some of the highest-risk exposures precisely because they exist outside normal security processes. They don’t receive patches, aren’t covered by security policies, and often contain misconfigurations that would be caught during standard deployment reviews.
Shadow IT includes:
- SaaS applications adopted without IT approval
- Personal devices connecting to corporate networks and cloud services
- Development tools and environments created outside official channels
- IoT devices like printers, smart displays, and cameras with network connectivity
Rogue assets are unauthorized systems connected to organizational infrastructure, sometimes accidentally (a contractor’s laptop, a forgotten test server) and sometimes maliciously (an attacker’s persistence mechanism).
Both categories share a common problem: traditional security tools can’t protect assets they don’t know exist. Vulnerability scanners only scan inventoried systems. EDR only protects enrolled endpoints. Patch management only updates known assets.
Attack surface discovery closes this gap through continuous external scanning that identifies assets based on their association with organizational domains, IP ranges, certificates, and other fingerprints, regardless of whether they were provisioned through official channels. When discovery identifies an unknown asset, security teams can investigate: is this legitimate shadow IT that needs to be brought under management, or a rogue system that requires immediate remediation?
How Does Dark Web Monitoring Complement Attack Surface Discovery?
Traditional attack surface discovery focuses on identifying what assets exist and what vulnerabilities they contain. Dark web monitoring extends this visibility to show what attackers already know and what access they may already have.
Leaked Credentials: Stealer logs and data breaches expose usernames, passwords, and session cookies for corporate systems. Even if your VPN is properly configured, an employee’s compromised credentials can provide direct access. Dark web monitoring identifies these exposures so you can force password resets before attackers exploit them.
Exposed Data: Sensitive documents, source code, API keys, and configuration files appear on paste sites, dark web forums, and Telegram channels. This exposure may indicate a past breach, an insider threat, or a misconfigured system that’s actively leaking data.
Threat Actor Interest: Mentions of your organization on dark web forums (discussions of targeting, reconnaissance findings, or access for sale) provide early warning of potential attacks. If an Initial Access Broker lists access to a company matching your profile, that’s actionable intelligence even if they don’t name you directly.
Third-Party Exposure: Your attack surface extends to vendors and partners. Dark web monitoring can identify when third parties in your supply chain are compromised, giving you time to assess and mitigate downstream risk.
Attack surface discovery tells you what’s exposed. Dark web monitoring tells you what attackers are doing with that exposure.
What Should You Look for in an Attack Surface Discovery Solution?
Effective attack surface discovery requires more than periodic scanning. Key capabilities include:
Continuous Discovery: Assets appear and disappear constantly. Point-in-time assessments miss short-lived exposures and create gaps between scans. Continuous discovery maintains an always-current inventory.
Comprehensive Coverage: Discovery should span all asset types, including cloud resources across multiple providers, on-premises systems, SaaS applications, APIs, mobile applications, and third-party infrastructure. Coverage limited to traditional servers and web applications leaves significant blind spots.
Accurate Attribution: Distinguishing your assets from unrelated systems requires sophisticated fingerprinting. False positives waste analyst time; false negatives leave blind spots.
Contextual Enrichment: Raw asset lists aren’t actionable. Effective solutions enrich discoveries with vulnerability data, configuration analysis, ownership information, and threat intelligence to enable prioritization.
Integration: Discovery data should flow into existing security workflows (SIEM, SOAR, vulnerability management, ticketing systems) rather than creating another siloed dashboard.
Dark Web Intelligence: The best solutions combine external scanning with dark web monitoring to show both what’s exposed and what attackers have already obtained.
Attack Surface Discovery and Flare
Flare provides a comprehensive Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution that combines external attack surface management with dark web monitoring and threat intelligence. Our platform continuously discovers internet-facing assets associated with your organization, identifies vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and monitors dark web sources for leaked credentials, exposed data, and threat actor activity targeting your environment.
Flare integrates cyber threat intelligence (CTI), digital risk protection (DRP), and external attack surface management (EASM) into a unified platform, eliminating the blind spots that exist when these functions operate in silos. Security teams gain complete visibility into both their technical exposure and the threat landscape targeting them.
Our solution integrates into your security program in 30 minutes to provide your team with actionable intelligence and automated remediation for high-risk exposure. See it yourself with our free trial.
