Key Takeaways

• Exposure management is a proactive approach focused on identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating security risks across the entire digital and physical attack surface, moving beyond just known vulnerabilities (CVEs).
• Effective exposure management requires an attacker-centric view and contextual prioritization.
• An effective program is built on five key pillars: Asset Discovery (Visibility), Assessment (Contextual Risk), Prioritization (Focus), Remediation (Action), and Continuous Monitoring and Validation.

Introduction

Exposure management is the continuous process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating security risks across the entire digital and physical attack surface.
This is a shift from the more reactive approach taken with vulnerability management to a more proactive, exposure-focused security posture. Whereas vulnerability management focuses on common vulnerability exploits (CVEs), exposure management places an emphasis on the broader picture, encapsulating your

organization’s entire attack surface instead of narrowing on known vulnerabilities, coming from the view of the adversary.

Where could an attacker get in? What is the lowest hanging fruit for someone looking to exploit an opening in your systems?

From there, you can identify and address the most critical issues first.

Why is Exposure Management More Important Than Ever?

Companies face an ever-expanding attack surface. With cloud instances, IoT, remote work, third-party APIs, and shadow IT, the “perimeter” is essentially nonexistent now. Additionally, teams are working within traditional, siloed security tools that only show a fraction of the true picture, missing views into your external assets, brand impersonations, or supply chain risks.

Moreover, security teams are suffering from alert fatigue. They are bombarded with security alerts, many of which are low-priority, but still take some level of investigation to confirm. Drowning in the noise, security teams can’t tell what actually matters without investing more of what they already lack: time.

Exposure management covers those blindspots. Taking an attack-centric approach gives you the view into where you’re most at risk.

Adversaries don’t care about your CVSS scores; they care about a path to entry. Exposure management adopts the attack perspective to prevent that from happening.

The 5 Key Pillars of an Exposure Management Program

Pillar 1: Asset Discovery (Visibility)

You can’t protect what you don’t know you have.

The asset discovery portion of exposure management comprises of a complete audit of all your digital and physical assets. This includes all internal and external assets (e.g., forgotten subdomains, exposed cloud storage, code repositories).

Pillar 2: Assessment (Contextual Risk)

This is more than just scanning. Exposure management adds context to what you’ve discovered, such as:

• Is this vulnerability actually exploitable?
• Is it being actively exploited in the wild?
• How critical is the asset it’s on to your organization?
• What other assets are connected to the asset it’s on?

Pillar 3: Prioritization (Focus)

With exposure management, you move beyond the traditional high/medium/low generalization with the contextualized view of your full attack surface.

Now you can prioritize what really matters (like fixing an exploitable vulnerability on a critical, internet-facing server), helping you cut through the noise to focus on what actually is at risk rather than lower priorities, such as a “critical” CVE that turns out to be on a test machine instead of essential infrastructure.

Pillar 4: Remediation (Action)

Once you’ve identified your full attack service, provided context towards your exposures, and prioritized which vulnerabilities are the most critical to fix first, you’re ready to act.

This could be patching, changing configurations, or implementing compensating controls where needed. Once you’ve validated and confirmed that the fixes were successful, it’s time to be proactive.

Pillar 5: Continuous Monitoring and Validation

An organization’s attack surface isn’t static; it changes daily. Exposure management must be a continuous loop — meaning you can’t get away with just a quarterly scan. This is an

iterative process that feeds insights back to the first Pillar, starting the cycle over again to ensure your critical systems remain uncompromised.

Overcoming Exposure Management Challenges with Threat Intelligence

The biggest challenge in exposure management is the lack of context. How do you know what to prioritize? How can you be sure you’re seeing everything?
This is where intelligence-led exposure management comes in.
Recorded Future’s Attack Surface Intelligence provides a true outside-in view, just like an attacker. This shows you exposed assets, cases of shadow IT, and third-party risks that other internal tools miss.
In addition to helping you identify and inventory internet-facing assets, understand potential risks, and take action to reduce or manage risk, Recorded Future’s Attack Surface Intelligence enriches every finding, providing real-time data on whether a vulnerability is being exploited, if it’s part of a ransomware TTP, or if an asset that allows remote access has exposed credentials being sold on the dark web.
This enables your teams to prioritize based on true risk—not theoretical CVSS scores.

By integrating this intelligence into your existing workflows (SOAR, SIEM, ticketing, etc.), Recorded Future helps teams remediate faster and provides continuous monitoring for new threats targeting your specific technology and industry.

Building Your Exposure Management Strategy

Your exposure management strategy doesn’t have to be complex. A simple and practical approach can help you significantly improve your security and defense.

1. Start with discovery: Get an initial baseline of your external attack surface.
2. Identify your critical assets: Map out your mission critical systems and assets that your business can’t afford to lose.
3. Integrate intelligence into your findings: Stop relying on CVSS alone. Feed real-time threat data into your prioritization.
4. Measure and report: Track your improvement over time (e.g., time-to-patch criticals, reduction in exposed assets, etc.) to share with important stakeholders.

Ready for a more intelligent solution for your threat management? Schedule a demo or start a trial to experience how real-time exposure management can improve the cybersecurity posture of your organization.