THE ROI PROBLEM IN ATTACK SURFACE MANAGEMENT

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Attack Surface Management programs struggle to demonstrate ROI because they optimize for coverage metrics like asset counts and alerts generated rather than measuring actual risk reduction, creating a gap between effort and security outcomes. Traditional ASM implementations focus on discovery inputs while teams experience alert fatigue, long backlogs of unresolved assets, ownership confusion, and exposures that persist for months without clear evidence of improved security posture. Organizations should shift to outcome-based metrics, including mean time to asset ownership, reduction in unauthenticated state-changing endpoints, and time to decommission abandoned assets—measurements that directly correlate with exposure duration and demonstrate whether the attack surface is actually shrinking over time.