As its name states, Mandiant Advantage Attack Surface Management (MA-ASM) is an attack surface management tool and shouldn’t be confused with vulnerability management tools. While both MA-ASM and vulnerability management tools both perform vulnerability analysis against a network range, there are several differentiating points, as described in the following table.
| Mandiant Advantage Attack Surface Management | Vulnerability management tools | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Sophisticated scoping mechanisms to automatically decide whether an asset should be scoped. | Must be pointed at a network range, and has no concept of scope beyond this. |
| Vulnerability Scanning | Focuses on unauthenticated techniques (like an attacker would), on hosts, apps, APIs, and more. | Focuses on authenticated and unauthenticated techniques, only on hosts. |
| Asset Inventory | Broad scope, including hosts, apps, cloud resources, networks). | Narrow scope, limited to only hosts. |
| In-depth enrichment and information available for discovered assets. | Limited, often incorrect or inferred information about each host. | |
| Technology Inventory | In-depth technology discovery capabilities and tech inventory across all assets. | Does not identify technologies beyond what's needed for vulnerability scanning. |
| Searchable technology directory. | Not available. | |
| Third Party Inventory | Utilizes global intelligence to identify third-party services and applications. | Does not do anything to identify third-party services or supply chain. |