In cybersecurity, there has been more than a fair share of hype—and skepticism—about Continuous Attack Surface Management (CASM). Over the past few years, fueled by rising complexity and sprawling tech landscapes, CASM quickly became a top-of-mind initiative for security leaders and analysts.
Today, however, some question whether Continuous Attack Surface Management is living up to its promise. Gartner's 2024 research suggests a more nuanced answer: CASM isn’t overhyped—but it’s incomplete without validation.
Here’s what security teams need to know.
What is Continuous Attack Surface Management?
Continuous Attack Surface Management is a practice of ongoing discovery, inventory, and risk monitoring of an organization’s internet-facing (or external) assets. Unlike traditional asset management or vulnerability scanning, CASM focuses on a regular cadence that detects when assets have been modified, changed or misconfigured.
At its best, CASM offers security teams real-time visibility into their sprawling external footprint. It uncovers shadow IT, cloud misconfigurations, forgotten subdomains, and third-party exposures. The idea is to replace point-in-time audits with continuous, dynamic oversight.
The attack surface can change in one day, let alone a week, month or year. That’s why continuous monitoring is necessary. It’s just impossible to keep up without it.
Why CASM caught fire so quickly
According to Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle report, the rise of ASM was driven by an urgent need for greater visibility. Early EASM tools helped organizations discover 20% to 50% more assets than they thought they had, proving that blind spots were not only common, but dangerous.
Yet visibility alone wasn’t enough. Once armed with massive lists of external assets, many security teams faced a new kind of challenge: information overload. Without deeper context or real-world validation, teams struggled to prioritize which risks actually mattered. The typical ASM dashboard offered visibility, but no easy answers to critical questions like: Is this exposure exploitable? Could it impact your crown jewels? Is the exploit being used by threat actors currently?
Without validation or prioritization, CASM can lead to overwhelmed teams, bloated backlogs, and ultimately, increased risk—not because it failed, but because discovery alone doesn't equal protection.
What analysts says about the future of CASM
Rather than declaring CASM obsolete, Gartner’s latest research proposes an evolution. Organizations must expand beyond simple discovery toward a broader model of Exposure Management.
So, discovery remains crucial—but it must be paired with context, validation, and prioritization. Instead of simply asking what vulnerabilities exist, security teams must ask which vulnerabilities are truly exploitable and which assets are critical to my business.
This shift from passive visibility to actionable prioritization is necessary. It transforms exposure management from an endless asset inventory into a dynamic risk reduction strategy.
Where Adversarial Exposure Validation can help
This is precisely where Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) can pick up the slack.
AEV moves organizations beyond static asset discovery. It actively replicates real-world attacker behavior against your environment, determining which exposures are reachable, exploitable, and impactful. Instead of flooding teams with a thousand vulnerabilities, AEV identifies the handful that they need to address now.
By testing defenses continuously without disrupting operations, AEV validates which assets are genuinely vulnerable and where controls might fail. It acts as the bridge between discovery and action, ensuring security teams don’t waste their time and resources.
Without AEV, Continuous Attack Surface Management risks becoming just another source of noise. With AEV, they become a force multiplier.
Imagine a typical security team leveraging only the discovery portion of CASM. Without further validation, they must manually triage each finding. This can bring your roadmap to a complete standstill.
Now picture that same team using CASM paired with AEV. Instead of treating every alert equally, they see clear, validated risks that are corroborated by CTI insights. They know which vulnerabilities expose sensitive data, which APIs are externally reachable, and which misconfigurations could lead to initial access.
The result is faster mean-time-to-remediation (MTTR), sharper focus, and a significantly reduced attack surface.
So is the era of Continuous Attack Surface Management over?
No—not at all. Continuous Attack Surface Management is just the beginning of a mature offensive cybersecurity posture. Organizations must know what they have and what’s exposed to the outside world.
However, visibility without validation creates risk. Discovery without context leads to wasted cycles and missed opportunities to shut down real threats. CASM is the beginning, not the end, of continuous exposure management.
The future belongs to security teams who think like attackers: discovering exposures continuously, validating them realistically, and prioritizing action based on business impact—not guesswork.
CASM showed us what we couldn’t see. AEV shows us what matters most. Together, they power a security strategy that is proactive, intelligent, and attacker-resilient.
