Other ASM vendors count metadata as if it’s distinct infrastructure – every SSL certificate, DNS wildcard, and open port – flooding your queue with low-signal assets that eat your analysts’ time that could be better spent responding to real exposure.
Analyzing asset inflation across 1 root domain...
Based on analysis of our customers’ attack surface data, we estimate that 91% of what’s in your ASM platform is noise – created by duplicate or phantom infrastructure. Here’s why:
Your SSL certificates, DNS records, and ports are counted as individual assets. That inflates your asset count and gives analysts more assets to triage.
No double-counting here. SSL certificates, DNS records, and ports are tracked as metadata under the root domain – not counted separately.
Think of a house with five doors, each with a lock. The house is the asset – in your attack surface, that's a hostname or web application. The doors and locks matter because they control access to it, but they are not ten additional properties.
A port, DNS record, or certificate works the same way. Their security meaning comes from the infrastructure they belong to. Searchlight counts the underlying infrastructure – subdomains, attributable IPs, and cloud assets – and keeps those details attached as context.
Other ASM vendors count them as separate assets, inflating your count without revealing a larger attack surface. Searchlight just counts the house – meaning your team doesn’t lose time on findings that were never a real risk.
| Asset Type | Other ASM Vendors (Today) | Searchlight Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| ▤ Subdomains | ||
| ▣ SSL Certificates | Domain metadata(not extra assets) | |
| ◫ DNS Records | Domain metadata(not extra assets) | |
| ◉ Open Ports | Domain metadata(not extra assets) | |
| Total to Monitor |
Searchlight discovers everything across your exposure fabric, including exposures in third-party tools the rest of the market can’t see yet, with the proof of concept attached.
Catch exposures as they happen – Searchlight discovers and validates exposures on your attack surface every hour.
Searchlight’s research team finds zero-days in enterprise software, turning them into a check the platform, often weeks or months before the public disclosure.
Ready to uncover your true external attack surface?
The threats that are both exploitable and actively targeted rise to the top of your queue, so you can resolve them before attackers act. That's Preemptive Threat Exposure Management.
We’ll check for leaked credentials, exposed data, and mentions of your organization on the dark web.
Check Your Dark Web Exposure – Free →“I asked our SOC Team Leader earlier, how long could we be without Searchlight? Would it be for minutes, hours, days? The response: We couldn't. The Searchlight ASM solution is a key part of our security program, and we could not do without it.”