Why Customers Choose CyCognito over CrowdStrike Falcon Surface
CrowdStrike's External Attack Surface Management (EASM) solution, Falcon Surface, was introduced to the market two years ago following the 2022 acquisition of EASM-startup Reposify. Both the underlying technology and the integration into the CrowdStrike ecosystem rely fundamentally on passive discovery and testing methodologies that significantly limit its effectiveness in identifying and mitigating potential threats.
Passive discovery, while valuable for initial reconnaissance, lacks the depth and accuracy of active discovery and testing techniques. When discovering assets, this can result in unknown unknowns remaining invisible, while passive testing techniques miss critical risks and don’t validate the severity and exploitability of identified exposures. This can leave security teams with a deluge of unverified data and the difficult task of manually sifting through it to identify critical threats, potentially delaying response times and increasing the organization's vulnerability to attack.
Organization Discovery & Mapping
Use deep discovery to see what an attacker sees.
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Falcon Surface limited discovery misses unknown assets and key asset types.
- Falcon Surface requires customer input to identify and map subsidiaries
- Falcon Surface’s discovery process is solely based on domain addresses, leaving critical assets like web applications, APIs, and cloud instances in the dark
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CyCognito starts by mapping your organization and continuously updates it as your business changes.
- CyCognito uses natural language processing, machine learning, and a graph data model to automatically map the organization, and identify subsidiaries
- CyCognito goes beyond owned environments, covering web applications, data centers, SaaS, IaaS, partners, brands, acquired companies, joint ventures, and cloud environments
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Zero-Input Discovery
Find your unknown unknowns.
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Falcon Surface cannot keep up with your dynamic attack surface.
- Falcon Surface passive and active discovery methods require customer-supplied seed data and fail to identify the unknown-unknown assets that create the bulk of exposures
- Falcon Surface requires manual tagging and curating to fully contextualize assets
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CyCognito doesn’t rely on what you know to find what you don’t.
- CyCognito requires zero-input, zero-seeds, zero configuration, and zero onboarding
- CyCognito uses OSINT-based reconnaissance techniques to attribute and contextualize the entire attack surface and identify unknown unknowns
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Automated Unauthenticated Security Testing
High confidence automated risk validation for all assets.
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Falcon Surface makes security teams choose between limited passive testing or disruptive agent-based testing.
- Falcon Surface offers no active agent-less testing and focuses primarily on noisy passive scanning, leaving most of your attack surface in the dark and untested
- Falcon Surface misses threat vectors that can only be evaluated with active tests, like web applications (using DAST)
- Falcon Surface’s integrations with VM solutions require heavy configuration and management and cannot fully actively test the exposed attack surface
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CyCognito actively and non-intrusively tests for 10,000s of CVEs with more than 80,000 tests.
- CyCognito’s automated, unauthenticated security tests span 35+ categories, including DAST, WebApp OWASP Top 10, weak credentials, exploitable vulnerabilities, and data exposure
- CyCognito’s testing engines cover 100% of your exposed attack surface on customizable cadences, even for attack surfaces that contain millions of assets and tens of thousands of web applications
- CyCognito tests your entire exposed attack surface – no additional products or integrations required
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Accelerated Red Teaming
Maximize the results of your pen testing.
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Falcon Surface leaves red teams wasting time on asset discovery and basic tests.
- Falcon Surface’s reliance on passive testing and vulnerability management integrations misses real risks and leads to false positives
- Falcon Surface fails to provide crucial asset context and attribution information
- Falcon Surface doesn’t discover unknown unknowns, leaving the riskiest assets in the dark and untested
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CyCognito’s single source of truth scales your red team and makes your pen-testing budget go further.
- CyCognito’s suite of +80,000 unauthenticated automated remote checks reduces repetitive work
- CyCognito supplies context and attribution for all external assets, making pen test information easier to operationalize
- CyCognito provides the coverage, accuracy and frequency required to understand gaps in security posture
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Risk-based Issue Prioritization
Focus on risks, not on issues.
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Falcon Surface misses key context, assets, and issues, leading to ineffective prioritization.
- Falcon Surface lacks the active testing results needed to identify truly exploitable risks
- Falcon Surface relies primarily on passive scanning and fails to account for factors like exploitability and asset attractiveness, slowing MTTR
- Falcon Surface’s inadequate asset discovery means many assets are missed and aren’t prioritized
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CyCognito’s prioritization considers asset attractiveness to attackers, business context, targeted threat intelligence, and results from 80,000+ tests.
- CyCognito’s next-gen prioritization algorithms identify less than 0.1% of issues as critical, focusing your teams on the most critical risks to your attack surface
- CyCognito prioritizes every issue alongside verifiable evidence of exploitability, enabling a >60% reduction in MTTR, often days instead of weeks
- CyCognito’s comprehensive asset discovery ensures every potential risk is assessed and prioritized
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Remediation Validation and Integrations
Minimize errors, maximize efficiency.
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Falcon Surface’s lack of connectors and remediation tools slows MTTR.
- Falcon Surface’s reporting capabilities are limited and users need to manually export and format data*
- Falcon Surface alone cannot validate remediation success, requiring manual followup
- Falcon Surface lacks the ability to build a remediation plan to guide systematic improvements
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CyCognito works directly with leading security solutions like Splunk, ServiceNow, and Armis.
- CyCognito users can automatically generate reports for a variety of audiences, including executive reports tailored for the C-suite
- CyCognito’s Remediation Validation feature automatically checks if a remediation attempt has been successful
- CyCognito’s Remediation Planner tool builds remediation plans to improve the security posture of organizations and their subsidiaries
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* According to their evaluation in the The Forrester Wave™: Attack Surface Management Solutions, Q3 2024
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