Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management (Defender EASM)

Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management (Defender EASM) is a powerful tool for organizations looking to gain comprehensive visibility and insights over their external-facing infrastructure. In this blog, we will explore the features and capabilities of Defender EASM, including discovery and inventory, dashboards, and managing assets

Discovery and inventory

Defender EASM leverages Microsoft's proprietary discovery technology to recursively search for infrastructure with observed connections to known legitimate assets. These assets, called discovery "seeds," are used to make inferences about an organization's online infrastructure and to uncover previously unknown and unmonitored properties. Defender EASM discovers a variety of assets, including domains, hostnames, web pages, IP blocks, IP addresses, ASNs, SSL certificates, and WHOIS contacts. Discovered assets are indexed and classified in the Defender EASM inventory, providing a dynamic record of all web infrastructure under the organization's management.

Dashboards

Defender EASM provides a series of dashboards designed to help users quickly understand their online infrastructure and any key risks to their organization. These dashboards provide insight on specific areas of risk, including vulnerabilities, compliance, and security hygiene. These insights help customers quickly address the components of their attack surface that pose the greatest risk to their organization.

Managing assets

Defender EASM allows customers to filter their inventory to surface the specific insights they care about most. Filtering offers a level of flexibility and customization that enables users to access a specific subset of assets. This allows organizations to leverage Defender EASM data according to their specific use case, whether searching for assets that connect to deprecating infrastructure or identifying new cloud resources.

Conclusion

Defender EASM is a powerful tool that provides organizations with comprehensive visibility and insights into their external-facing infrastructure. The tool leverages proprietary discovery technology to discover and index a variety of assets, providing a dynamic record of all web infrastructure under an organization's management. The dashboards and filtering capabilities help users quickly understand their online infrastructure and any key risks to their organization. The tool also offers robust user permissions and data privacy features, ensuring that organizations can trust Defender EASM with their most sensitive data.