Surface Monitoring Use Cases
Surface Monitoring addresses several key challenges that security teams face when managing an organization’s external presence.
Continuous Attack Surface Monitoring
Most organizations have a larger external footprint than they realize. Development teams spin up new services, marketing launches campaign microsites, and partners integrate with your infrastructure. Surface Monitoring provides continuous visibility into these changes.
The challenge: Your asset inventory is always out of date. New subdomains, IP addresses, and services appear between quarterly audits.
How Surface Monitoring helps: Automated discovery runs continuously, detecting new assets within hours of their appearance. Certificate Transparency monitoring catches new subdomains as soon as certificates are issued. Policies alert you to specific changes that matter to your team.
Shadow IT Discovery
Shadow IT refers to infrastructure and services deployed without the knowledge or approval of the security team. This commonly includes test environments, proof-of-concept applications, and third-party SaaS integrations that create DNS records under your domains.
The challenge: Teams deploy resources without informing security. These assets often lack hardening, patching, and monitoring.
How Surface Monitoring helps: Discovery techniques find assets regardless of how they were provisioned. Technology fingerprinting identifies what software is running on discovered assets, helping you assess risk even for previously unknown infrastructure.
Mergers and Acquisitions Due Diligence
When acquiring a company, understanding their external attack surface is critical for assessing security risk and planning integration.
The challenge: Acquired companies may not have a complete inventory of their external assets. Legacy infrastructure, forgotten environments, and undocumented services create hidden risk.
How Surface Monitoring helps: Add the acquired company’s root domains to Surface Monitoring before or during the acquisition process. Within days, you have a comprehensive view of their external footprint, including technologies in use, open ports, SSL/TLS configuration, and potential vulnerabilities.
Compliance and Audit Readiness
Many compliance frameworks require organizations to maintain an inventory of internet-facing assets and demonstrate continuous monitoring. Surface Monitoring provides evidence that you are actively tracking and assessing your external attack surface.
The challenge: Auditors require proof of asset inventory management and vulnerability scanning across your external infrastructure.
How Surface Monitoring helps: Surface Monitoring maintains a continuously updated asset inventory with discovery timestamps, technology details, and assessment results. Findings include severity ratings and remediation status tracking that maps to compliance reporting needs.
Subdomain Takeover Prevention
Subdomain takeover occurs when a DNS record (typically a CNAME) points to a third-party service that has been deprovisioned. An attacker can claim the service and serve content under your domain.
The challenge: Organizations frequently create CNAME records for services like GitHub Pages, Heroku, AWS S3, or Azure, then forget to clean up DNS when the service is removed.
How Surface Monitoring helps: Subdomain takeover checks run every 8 hours, detecting dangling DNS records before attackers can exploit them. When a takeover risk is identified, you receive a finding with details about the affected subdomain and the unclaimed service.
Cloud Infrastructure Visibility
Organizations using multiple cloud providers often lose track of assets spread across accounts, regions, and services.
The challenge: Cloud resources are easy to create and easy to forget. Developers may provision resources in non-standard accounts or regions that are not covered by your cloud security posture management tools.
How Surface Monitoring helps: Cloud connectors for AWS, Azure, GCP, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, DigitalOcean, Alibaba Cloud, and IBM NS1 pull asset information directly from your cloud accounts. Combined with DNS-based discovery, this provides comprehensive coverage of your cloud-hosted attack surface.
Next Steps
- Getting Started — Set up Surface Monitoring for your organization
- Policies — Create rules to alert on specific attack surface changes
- Discovery — Understand how assets are discovered and monitored