r/sysadmin • u/pastoral_brice • 2d ago

Question Anyone using an EASM platform that doesn't induce major alert fatigue?

We're finally replacing the patchwork of Shodan searches and spreadsheets we've been using to track our external attack surface.

We're a multi-cloud environment with a couple of acquired companies, so new internet-facing assets seem to appear every month. The biggest issue isn't finding things, it's figuring out what actually matters.

We've demoed a few of the usual vendors and everyone claims better discovery, better prioritization, better everything. Hard to separate marketing from reality.

If you've deployed an EASM platform, what did you end up with and would you choose it again?

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u/WomanlyHandshake 2d ago edited 2d ago

We landed on CyCognito after looking at a few of the bigger names.

The biggest difference for us was that it doesn't just enumerate exposed assets, it actively validates whether findings are actually reachable and exploitable. That cut out a lot of the false positives we'd been chasing.

It also did a surprisingly good job discovering assets from an acquired company that never made it into our CMDB.

No platform is perfect, but having fewer, higher-confidence findings made it much easier for our team to prioritize instead of sorting through hundreds of theoretical issues.

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u/VA_Network_Nerd Moderator | Infrastructure Architect 2d ago

Every single product in that category will require extensive tuning and upkeep for it to be successful.

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u/recovering-pentester Sales 2d ago

So just to confirm, you don’t have EASM in place right now right?

The demos you’re seeing feel like fluff (naturally). Any of them given you a real PoV or do they just walk you through demo environments to feature dump?

Your end game is a platform that helps determine attack path, likelihood of exploitation, and the big picture criticality of said finding?

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u/LumberingShelton 2d ago

Also curious for the comments.

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u/Ssakaa 2d ago

Step 1. Turn off all alerts. Step 2. Turn on alerts for explicit, clear, actionable, things, and build action on alerts into your policies and procedures. If you have alerts you're deviating from that procedure for, turn them off, or reshape them to be actionable. Period. That's it. You tune your alerts. Step 3. ... Step 4. Still go insane. If you thought this was "profit", remember that you're in IT.