From Periodic Scans to Continuous ASM: Closing the Exposure Gap

The Bottom Line

Most attack surface management (ASM) programs rely on periodic scans. Attackers don’t. Using tools like Shodan and Censys, they identify exposed assets in real time — before internal teams even know they exist. This article outlines why snapshot-based ASM creates blind spots, and how continuous, intelligence-driven ASM catches what others miss — including leaked credentials, unknown environments, and critical misconfigurations.

As organizations expand across cloud platforms, hybrid environments, and distributed teams, their digital footprint becomes harder to track - and easier to exploit. Attack Surface Management (ASM) has become essential in this landscape: it’s how organizations identify, monitor, and secure their internet-facing assets before attackers do.

The Problem: You’re Visible - Even When You’re Not Looking

Most ASM programs rely on periodic scans - weekly, monthly, or quarterly. But attackers don’t wait. Using tools like Shodan, Censys, or ZoomEye, they continuously monitor the internet for misconfigured systems, exposed credentials, outdated software, or forgotten environments.

These platforms index the internet in real time and expose your digital perimeter to anyone with a browser.

You don’t need to be directly targeted to be exploited. Your exposure already exists public, accessible, and searchable.

The Defender’s Disadvantage

This creates a dangerous visibility gap. While your team waits for the next scheduled scan, attackers are:

• Seeing asset changes as they happen

• Exploiting new exposures before you even detect them

• Leveraging real-time intelligence that your snapshot-based approach can’t match

  
  

To stay ahead, ASM must be continuous. Real-time discovery, alerting, and integration with remediation workflows are no longer “nice to haves”—they’re mandatory.

Real-World Cases: What You Catch When You Look Continuously

Most organizations don’t have a visibility problem. They have a timing problem. Everything below was technically discoverable — it just wasn’t being looked for when it mattered.

01 Banking Sector – Valid Leaked Credentials Found in the Wild

In an engagement with a global bank, we extended our ASM coverage beyond basic discovery — integrating threat intelligence and breach data feeds. We flagged a leaked credential linked to the client, active and still in use.  

It provided access to the company’s internal training platform, which included file upload functionality — a direct risk for malware staging or exfiltration. Malicious actors could rapidly leverage the compromised credentials to infiltrate core systems, leading to severe data breach.

• Severity: Critical

• Breach Complexity: Low (credentials easily exploited)

• Frequency of such breaches: High (constant threat of credential leaks)

  
  

We escalated. They rotated credentials and tightened controls. But it didn’t end there — this incident led to a broader integration of CTI into their ASM workflows.

Without continuous, intelligence-led ASM, this wouldn’t have been caught until after impact.

02 Entertainment & Gaming – High-Risk Exposures in Unmapped Infrastructure

A global entertainment client had dozens of branded domains and hundreds of services running across multiple cloud providers. We used IONIX to perform full-spectrum attack surface discovery. Attack surface scan is divided to categories, each is scored according to its exposure and security assets scan.

Let's look at an example.

Two critical exposures stood out:

1. A public-facing app vulnerable to Reflected XSS

2. A legacy admin panel with Remote Code Execution (RCE) exposure

   
   

Both were live. Neither was in the organization’s asset inventory. A successful RCE attack, for instance, could allow hackers to modify or take complete control of systems, leading to loss of intellectual property, customer data, and operational continuity.

• Severity: Critical

• Breach Complexity: Medium to High

• Frequency: High

  
  

Remediation was swift — but more importantly, the client moved to fully managed, continuous ASM across all business units as a result.

03 Shadow IT – Contractor-Spawned Dev Environment

A dev environment spun up by a third-party went unnoticed by a company relying on quarterly scans. It was indexed by Shodan and flagged publicly - before they even knew it existed.

This asset remained accessible until it was flagged during our continuous monitoring long after it could have been discovered by periodic scans. Had an attacker queried Shodan first, they could’ve gained access, used it as an entry point, and pivoted deeper into the environment.

In this case, the mitigation was clear. The client implemented mandatory deployment approvals for third-party vendors, formalized asset registration, and adopted continuous ASM with real-time alerting to close the loop.

• Severity: Critical

• Breach Complexity: Low

• Frequency: High

What These Cases Have in Common:

• The assets were all publicly exposed

• They were all missed by internal controls

• They were all caught by continuous ASM

  
  

None of these required attackers to perform active scans. Shodan, Censys, and ZoomEye had already done the indexing. All an attacker needed was the right query. Publicly accessible cloud storage with sensitive data poses a significant risk of data breaches, privacy violations, and compliance violations under regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS.

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The attackers’ perspective:

Threat actor groups - including ransomware affiliates and nation-state APTs - increasingly rely on publicly available platforms to discover exploitable infrastructure.

For instance, campaigns attributed to groups like Scattered Spider, Volt Typhoon, and FIN7 have leveraged exposed RDP servers, misconfigured cloud assets, and forgotten web interfaces as their initial foothold. These groups are not performing brute-force reconnaissance - they’re simply watching what’s already visible online.

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Key Capabilities of an Effective ASM Program:

• Real-Time Asset Discovery

  Instant detection of new domains, services, APIs, and misconfigurations - without waiting for a scan.

• Contextual Prioritization

  Not all exposures are equal. We help you focus on what matters most-based on business impact, CVE severity, and active threat campaigns.

• Threat-Intelligence Integration

  We overlay your exposures with intel on which ones are being actively exploited - like vulnerable VPNs or exposed RDP servers actively targeted by the monitored cybercrime groups.

• Managed, Not Just Monitored

  We don’t just alert - we track, validate, and follow up until exposure is resolved, working hand-in-hand with your team.

  
  

From Point-in-Time to Real-Time: Why ASM Must Be Continuous, Not Periodic

Periodic scanning worked when digital environments were stable. Today, they’re not.

We offer ASM as a fully managed, continuous service - identifying changes as they happen, prioritizing based on real-world risk, and working with you to close exposures fast.

Because in a world where attackers never stop watching, you can’t afford to look away.