Attack surface monitoring is the continuous discovery and analysis of all assets, services, identities, and access points that attackers could exploit. This includes internet-facing infrastructure, cloud services, SaaS platforms, APIs, and sometimes internal attack paths.
Mean time to detect measures how quickly an organization identifies malicious activity after it begins. When you continuously monitor your attack surface, you detect risky changes earlier, which directly shortens the time between initial exposure and threat detection.
This connection is critical because attackers almost always interact with the attack surface before triggering traditional security alerts.
