Attack Surface Management
Detectify Surface Monitoring continuously discovers and monitors your organization’s external attack surface. It identifies domains, subdomains, IP addresses, open ports, and running technologies across your internet-facing infrastructure, then runs payload-based vulnerability tests against discovered assets.
What is External Attack Surface Management?
Your external attack surface is everything an attacker can see and potentially exploit from the outside: web applications, APIs, cloud services, DNS records, SSL certificates, and forgotten assets. As organizations grow, this surface expands in ways that are difficult to track manually.
Surface Monitoring automates the process of finding and assessing these assets so your security team can focus on remediation rather than discovery.
Key Capabilities
Continuous Discovery
Surface Monitoring uses multiple discovery techniques to find assets associated with your organization:
- Domain and subdomain enumeration through Certificate Transparency logs, DNS enumeration, and intelligent brute-forcing
- IP address discovery linked to your domains via DNS resolution
- Port scanning across your discovered IP addresses to identify running services
- Technology fingerprinting to identify frameworks, servers, and libraries in use
Vulnerability Assessment
Once assets are discovered, Surface Monitoring runs payload-based security tests to identify real vulnerabilities, not just theoretical risks. Tests cover SSL/TLS misconfigurations, subdomain takeover risks, and common web vulnerabilities.
Cloud Connectors
Connect your cloud accounts to ensure complete visibility across your infrastructure. Supported providers include:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Cloudflare
- GoDaddy
- DigitalOcean
- Alibaba Cloud
- IBM NS1
Cloud connectors allow Surface Monitoring to discover assets that might not be visible through DNS-based discovery alone, such as cloud storage buckets, load balancers, and services behind CDNs.
How Surface Monitoring Fits Your Security Program
Surface Monitoring complements application-level security testing by providing a broad view of all internet-facing assets rather than deep testing of individual applications.
Use Surface Monitoring to:
- Maintain an up-to-date inventory of all external assets
- Detect shadow IT and forgotten infrastructure
- Identify misconfigurations across your attack surface
- Monitor changes to your attack surface over time
- Enforce security policies across your entire surface
Next Steps
- How It Works — Understand the discovery and assessment pipeline
- Getting Started — Add your first domain and start monitoring
- Discovery — Learn about discovery methods and timing
- Policies — Set up automated rules for attack surface changes