Mapping your company's external attack surface means systematically discovering every asset, service, and exposure that an attacker on the internet can see — before they exploit it. This includes subdomains, open ports, cloud storage buckets, exposed secrets, outdated software with known CVEs, and any AI agents or MCP servers your team has shipped. Done properly, it gives you a ranked, evidence-backed list of what to fix first, rather than an overwhelming noise of alerts.
Your external attack surface is the sum of all internet-facing entry points an adversary could probe or exploit. Most organisations underestimate it because it grows faster than anyone tracks manually:
A one-time penetration test or a quarterly asset audit captures a snapshot. Your real surface changes every time a developer spins up a new service, a cloud bucket is misconfigured, or a dependency is updated with a new CVE. Attackers run continuous reconnaissance; your visibility needs to match that cadence. Manual processes also miss the long tail — subdomains discovered from certificate transparency logs, GitHub leaks, DNS brute-forcing, and passive DNS sources that no human checks daily.
Start with your root domains, IP ranges, ASN numbers, and company name. Even organisations that think they have a small footprint typically discover dozens of forgotten subdomains once they run a thorough discovery.
Pull from multiple sources simultaneously — certificate transparency logs, passive DNS databases, DNS brute-forcing, web crawling, GitHub repositories, and cloud provider metadata. Using a single source misses assets that only appear in others. Best-practice tooling aggregates 10 or more distinct discovery sources.
For every discovered host, scan for open ports and fingerprint the services running on them. Flag anything that should not be internet-facing — admin interfaces, databases, monitoring dashboards, remote-desktop protocols.
Match discovered service versions against CVE databases. Prioritise using EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores and the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue rather than raw CVSS alone — a CVE being actively exploited in the wild matters more than a theoretical high score.
Check exposed codebases, public repositories, and HTTP responses for credentials, tokens, and API keys. Critically, validate them — a leaked key that is already rotated is not an active risk; one that still works is urgent.
Enumerate cloud storage and identify buckets or subdomains that point to decommissioned cloud resources — a classic subdomain takeover vector that attackers use to serve phishing pages or malware under your trusted domain.
A raw list of findings is not actionable. Score exposures by exploitability, asset criticality, and real-world threat intelligence so your team works on what matters most, not just what is noisiest.
Schedule re-discovery at least daily or every few hours. Attack surface drift — new assets appearing, configurations changing — is constant. Monitoring must match attacker cadence.
Pinaka is an AI-powered External Attack Surface Management platform built to do exactly this — continuously and with verifiable evidence. Here is what makes it a strong fit:
You can run a free security check on your domain in under a minute, with no sign-up required. Visit pinaka.sh to get started.
At minimum, daily. The best practice is every few hours. Your infrastructure changes continuously — new deployments, DNS changes, cloud bucket creation — and attackers run reconnaissance constantly. Pinaka, for example, re-monitors every 6 hours to catch drift before adversaries do.
A penetration test is a time-boxed, manual (or semi-manual) engagement that goes deep on a defined scope. Attack surface management is continuous, broad, and automated — it discovers what is exposed across your entire footprint at all times. Both have value; ASM gives you the always-on visibility layer that feeds and informs pen testing scope.
Yes, and this is increasingly important. When you ship AI agents, the tools they hold and the actions they can invoke are exploitable. Attackers can abuse overpermissioned agent tools just as they exploit open ports. Mapping agent surface — what tools your agents can call, what data they can access — is now part of responsible security practice.
Use a combination of exploitability (is there a working public exploit?), active exploitation data (is it in the CISA KEV list?), and asset criticality (is this a customer-facing production system?). Raw CVSS scores alone are a poor guide — many high-CVSS vulnerabilities are rarely exploited in practice, while lower-scored issues in the KEV catalogue are actively weaponised.
Yes. Tools like Pinaka offer a free domain security check with no sign-up required, so you can see initial results for your domain in under a minute. This gives you an immediate sense of your visible exposure before committing to a full platform.