Prioritizing Your Attack Surface Remediation Efforts for 2026’s Top Threats

Managing your company’s cyber attack surface is more difficult than ever. There are simply too many internet-facing assets, combined with third-party dependencies, leaked credentials, and infrastructure that changes faster than security teams can keep up.

For that reason, attack surface management (ASM) is one of the key areas organizations must optimize heading into 2026. Discovering exposure is no longer the only focus. How you prioritize and remediate exposures will dictate how effectively you reduce real-world risk.

Here is how to optimize ASM for 2026’s threats:

What Are the Top Threats in 2026?

External exposures are among the main ways attackers gain a direct path into an organization’s environment. Heading into 2026, a few threat categories stand out.

Unmonitored or forgotten infrastructure is right up there. Digital footprints are so large nowadays, which means security teams often inherit more assets than they can track. Old domains left active, or endpoints that have drifted out of monitoring, are just some of the blind spots attackers look for.

Third-party assets are particularly hard to monitor. Modern organizations are deeply interconnected, relying heavily on third-party SaaS apps, code libraries, or cloud services. This expands the attack surface beyond the control of internal teams and means that a single weak link in the supply chain can create a path into your environment.

Leaked or stolen credentials are another common way attackers gain access. There are billions of stolen credentials being actively sold on the dark web, and new are surfacing every day from phishing campaigns or exposed secrets in public repositories.

Mapping Your Attack Surface

Mapping your attack surface means gaining full visibility into every asset that can expose your organization to risk. Modern attack surface management (ASM) platforms continuously discover and inventory external, internet-facing assets like IPs, domains, APIs, cloud instances, etc. A major benefit of ASM is the surfacing of shadow IT and forgotten infrastructure.

But visibility must extend beyond infrastructure. Dark web monitoring is also necessary to check for leaked credentials or other stolen secrets that attackers can weaponize at any time.

External scanning and monitoring data can be combined with internal documentation and asset inventories to maintain a continuously updated picture of the true attack surface. Only when all assets are accounted for can security teams truly assess exposure and begin prioritizing remediation efforts.

Continuous monitoring is just as important as initial discovery. Attack surfaces change every day with new endpoints, applications, or cloud instances. ASM must run continuously to detect these changes in real time and always have an up to date picture of asset exposure.

The Importance of Risk-Based Prioritization

Cybersecurity risk is measured in terms of likelihood of occurrence, relative to the severity of potential impact. It is likely that during discovery you will find many vulnerabilities across different assets, especially if ASM efforts were periodic (or non-existent) in the past.

Risk-based prioritization helps teams allocate resources efficiently, focusing first on those findings that present the highest levels of real-world danger. It’s impossible to fix everything all at once, so remediation efforts must be consciously directed.

When it comes to the issue of how to go about prioritizing, Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores are helpful for initial classification, but they don’t give the full picture about the exploitability or criticality of a particular asset.

A medium-severity vulnerability on a Domain Controller poses a higher risk than a critical vulnerability on an isolated internal server. CVSS scores also do not apply to some types of findings from ASM reports, such as misconfigurations.

To prioritize effectively, teams first must understand asset criticality, prioritizing systems that support core operations, financial processes, or handle customer data. Other factors, such as whether a vulnerability is actively exploited, or whether effective compensating controls are already in place, should also be taken into consideration.

Integrating Automation into Your Remediation Workflow

Automation significantly speeds up and scales attack surface remediation efforts. It’s not only helpful, but necessary given how many assets there are and the effort it takes to do everything manually.

There are several areas where automation is particularly useful. Among these are alert discovery, tagging, and risk scoring. Using predefined logic and rules, automation checks factors such as vulnerability details and the criticality of an asset to determine an accurate and context-driven risk score.

Patching can often likewise be at least partly automated. While patching critical systems automatically is not advised due to the risk of something breaking and causing disruptions, low-risk assets such as browsers or non-essential applications can safely be automated to speed up remediation.

Lastly, automation can take all new findings and push them through existing workflows. This includes SIEM and SOAR tools for immediate visibility, and ticketing systems like Jira to streamline task management.

Featured Image by Freepik.