Many organizations face critical blind spots in their cyber defenses. In fact, the Sophos State of Ransomware 2025 report found 40% of organizations impacted by ransomware in the last year reported falling victim due to an exposure they were unaware of.

Sophos Managed Risk, now with both internal and external attack surface management, addresses this challenge, providing comprehensive visibility into internal and external weaknesses that could be exploited by threat actors.

“With Sophos Managed Risk, organizations gain an attacker’s-eye view to identify and prioritize remediation of risks before adversaries can exploit them. The solution offers a unified view of both internal and external exposures prioritized by risk and paired with clear remediation guidance,” said Rob Harrison, Senior Vice President, Product Management at Sophos. “This enables organizations to focus their efforts where it matters most, on the most critical vulnerabilities, resolving them rapidly.”

The latest release of Sophos Managed Risk introduces unauthenticated internal scanning, which assesses a system from the perspective of an external attacker without user credentials or privileged access.

This enables organizations to identify and mitigate high-risk vulnerabilities, such as open ports, exposed services and misconfigurations that are accessible and potentially exploitable by attackers.

Features of IASM for Sophos Managed Risk include:

• Comprehensive vulnerability management: Regular automated scanning to identify weaknesses affecting assets within the network.
• AI-powered prioritization: Intelligently determines which vulnerabilities pose the highest risk and need immediate attention, guiding organizations to prioritize their patching and remediation efforts.
• Industry-leading technology: Sophos leverages Tenable Nessus scanners to detect vulnerabilities inside the network and determine their severity.
• The Sophos advantage: Unlike vendors that separate External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and IASM into distinct products, Sophos provides an integrated managed service powered by leading Tenable technology and backed by one of the world’s leading MDR services.

The new IASM capabilities are accessible through Sophos Managed Risk, an extended service with Sophos MDR.

The Sophos Managed Risk team is Tenable-certified and works closely with Sophos MDR to share essential information about zero-days, known vulnerabilities and exposure risks to assess and investigate possibly exploited environments.

IASM for Sophos Managed Risk is available today for all new and existing Sophos Managed risk customers, with no changes to licenses or pricing.

Customers can immediately benefit from the extended coverage by deploying Tenable Nessus scanners and scheduling automated scans in their Sophos Central console.

*Learn more about the new Internal Attack Surface Management capabilities and Sophos Managed Risk, visit Sophos.com/Managed-Risk.

The new service features a dedicated Sophos team that leverages Tenable’s exposure management technology and collaborates with the security operations experts from Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) to provide attack surface visibility, continuous risk monitoring, vulnerability prioritization, investigation, and proactive notification designed to prevent cyberattacks.

The modern attack surface has expanded beyond traditional on-premises IT boundaries, with organizations operating frequently unknown numbers of external and internet-facing assets that are unpatched or under protected, leaving them vulnerable to cyberattackers.

This is evident in the newest Sophos Active Adversary Report, also released, which identifies three tasks that organizations must prioritize to minimize the risk of brazen intrusions that lead to ransomware or other types of attacks.

These include closing exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access, enabling multi-factor authorization and patching vulnerable servers, all of which were top entry points in breaches handled by Sophos Incident Response in 2023.

The Sophos Managed Risk service can assess an organization’s external attack surface, prioritize the riskiest exposures, such as open RDP, and provide tailored remediation guidance to help eliminate blind spots and stay ahead of potentially devastating attacks.

“Sophos and Tenable are two industry security leaders coming together to address urgent, pervasive security challenges that organizations continuously struggle to control. We can now help organizations identify and prioritize the remediation of vulnerabilities in external assets, devices and software that are often overlooked. It is critical that organizations manage these exposure risks, because unattended, they only lead to more costly and time-consuming issues and are often the root causes of significant breaches,” said Rob Harrison, senior vice president for endpoint and security operations product management at Sophos. “We know from Sophos’ worldwide survey data that 32% of ransomware attacks start with an unpatched vulnerability and that these attacks are the most expensive to remediate. The ideal security layers to prevent these issues include an active approach to improving security postures by minimizing the chances of a breach with Sophos Managed Risk, Sophos Endpoint, and 24×7 Sophos MDR coverage.”

Greg Goetz, vice president of global strategic partners and MSSP, Tenable

“While the latest zero day may dominate the headlines, the biggest threat to organizations, by a large margin, is still known vulnerabilities – or vulnerabilities for which patches are readily available.

“A winning approach includes risk-based prioritization with context-driven analytics to proactively address exposures before they become a problem. Sophos Managed Risk, powered by the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, delivers outsourced preventive risk management, enabling organizations to anticipate attacks and reduce cyber risk.”

Specific key benefits of Sophos Managed Risk include:

• External Attack Surface Management (EASM): Advanced identification and classification of internet-facing assets, such as web and email servers, web applications, and public-facing API endpoints
• Continuous monitoring and proactive notification of high-risk exposures: Proactive notification when a new critical vulnerability is identified in an organization’s internet-facing assets
• Vulnerability prioritization and identification of new risks: Swift detection of high-risk and zero-day vulnerabilities, followed by real-time notification to ensure critical internet-facing assets are promptly identified, investigated and responded to by order of importance

“One of the biggest challenges organizations face when improving their security posture is prioritizing what to handle first. This type of guidance helps solve that issue and reduces the workload for security teams tasked with tackling vulnerability and exposure management,” said Craig Robinson, research vice president of Security Services, IDC. “Solutions such as Sophos Managed Risk can be a differentiator by enabling overwhelmed teams to take a more holistic approach to continuous monitoring and threat management.”

Sophos Managed Risk is available as an extended service with Sophos MDR, which already protects more than 21,000 organizations globally.

The Sophos Managed Risk team is Tenable-certified and works closely with Sophos MDR to share essential information about zero-days, known vulnerabilities and exposure risks to assess and investigate possibly exploited environments.

“Sophos Managed Risk simplifies the difficult and resource consuming task of identifying vulnerabilities, really understanding the extent of risk exposure, and prioritizing necessary remediations,” said Kieron Stone, cybersecurity business development manager at Phoenix Software Ltd. “As a trusted managed service provider (MSP), this is a service we’re proud to stand behind, and nearly all our customers using it have already discovered significant vulnerabilities that they were previously unaware of. For organizations that don’t already have a well-defined vulnerability patching cadence, this is a must-have service for the identification of vulnerabilities and building that schedule; and for organizations that are already managing vulnerabilities, it’s a second set of eyes for added peace of mind that they’re not missing anything.”

Organizations benefit through regular interaction, including scheduled meetings with Sophos experts to review recent discoveries, insights into the current threat landscape, and recommendations for remediation and prioritizing actions.

Additionally, organizations can initiate inquiries via the Sophos Central platform, allowing users to directly engage with the Sophos Managed Risk team for tailored support, reports and to review their latest prioritized alerts.

“You can’t fix what you can’t see. Sophos Managed Risk is shining a light on areas of exposure that require remediation in order to keep customers protected. Combining Sophos’ elite MDR experts with Tenable’s industry-leading exposure management technology gives us a full picture view of vulnerabilities with the guidance we need to minimize risk,” said Brooks Roy, president at Communications Consulting, Inc. “The real value add for us as a channel partner is having the ability to easily manage Sophos Managed Risk’s prioritized alerts across our customer base on the Sophos Central dashboard.”

Sophos Managed Risk is available with a term license through Sophos’ global network of channel partners and Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

A Sophos MSP Flex version will be available in 2024.