(EASM) Preventing a Data Breach via Exposed Test Server Using EASM

Business Challenges

The IT company hosted multiple customer portals and APIs across different clouds; over time, projects were moved or rebuilt, but old internet‑facing test environments were left online and largely forgotten.
Traditional vulnerability scans and CMDB only covered “known” production systems, so shadow IT assets and abandoned subdomains were never assessed, creating hidden entry points for attackers

Digital Transformation

Adopted External Attack Surface Management to continuously look at the company’s environment from an attacker’s perspective, discovering all internet‑visible assets and their weaknesses
Moved from periodic, IP‑range‑based scanning to domain‑, DNS‑, and certificate‑driven discovery, automatically tracking new subdomains and cloud endpoints as they appeared.

Key Solutions

EASM discovery identified an old development web server still exposed on a forgotten subdomain, running an outdated framework with a publicly known remote code execution vulnerability
The platform flagged this asset as high‑risk due to outdated software, exposed admin panel, and missing TLS hardening, and correlated it with the main customer‑data environment, showing that compromise could lead to internal access
The SOC opened a high‑priority incident; infrastructure teams confirmed the server was no longer needed and immediately removed public DNS records and shut down the instance, then verified there were no signs of prior compromise

Business Benefits

Eliminated a critical external entry point that could have allowed attackers to gain a foothold and pivot toward systems processing customer PII and credentials
Demonstrated to management how one neglected internet‑facing asset can create breach‑level risk, helping justify ongoing investment in continuous EASM monitoring instead of one‑time audits.

Best Practices

Treat every new external-facing environment (POC, test, marketing site) as in‑scope for EASM from day one, with automatic discovery and tagging to avoid becoming shadow IT later.
Use EASM risk scoring to prioritize issues that combine exploitability and business impact (e.g., internet‑facing, outdated, reachable path to sensitive systems) instead of chasing every low‑risk port finding.

Client

Enterprise (Large organizations across IT, Finance, Operations, Customer Service)

Partners

EASM implementation led by a security engineering / SOC team working with an external EASM platform provider, responsible for configuration, tuning, and integration with existing SIEM and ticketing tools