Censys

Censys is a developer of a data-driven security platform designed to serve customers to find relevant content on the internet. The company's platform creates a broad, deep, and relevant dataset that provides greater visibility into vulnerabilities and a comprehensive view of the internet-exposed infrastructure. This includes allowing users to discover devices, networks, and infrastructure on the internet by monitoring how it changes over time. This monitoring offers continuous visibility and real-time risk assessment.

Censys was started at the University of Michigan in 2017 and works to provide a platform to protect an organization by discovering unknown assets and associated risks. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Censys's platform works to provide comprehensive real-time internet attack surface discovery and internet scan data to give security teams insight into an organization's digital risk and exposure. This allows for discovery of unknown internet assets, identification and remediation of internet risks, threat intelligence, cloud governance, maintenance of a comprehensive inventory of possible risks or assets, and ensuring of organizational compliance.

Attack Surface Management (ASM) provides a picture of an organization's actual attack surface, not just what a user thinks is the attack surface. This is provided through continual discovery and monitoring of assets, which allows users to remediate risk and exposure for an organization. The asset discovery includes services, hosts, websites, storage buckets, and cloud accounts. And with an algorithmic discovery and automated attribution to provide accurate and up-to-date views of an attack surface, Censys ASM can integrate into existing vulnerability management, web security, and CSPM tools to discover, monitor, and identify weaknesses and misconfigurations, which can include expiring certificates, end-of-life software, and insecure TLS configurations.

When engaged in a merger and acquisition transaction, or for subsidiary organizations, Censys's ASM offers an ability to assess the assets of a new or existing subsidiary or acquired organization to understand what new risks these organizations and their internet-facing assets bring, and prepare the user to protect an organization from unnecessary exposures or breaches. This also works to uncover unknown cloud accounts and identify misconfigured assets across cloud providers, while providing analysis of cloud accounts in real time.

A feature included in the ASM platform, Workspaces allows users to segment and organize a company's attack surface by individual companies, and breaking up an attack surface to strategically view all potential security risks facing a company.

Censys's platform also works to continuously scan 101 protocols across the top 3,500 ports on the full IPv4 address every ten days and to scan the top 100 IPv4 ports daily to produce a high-resolution map of the public internet, and provide threat hunters, attack surface manages, and related security professionals visibility into those threats. This includes detection and investigation into threat actors and can provide a global perspective on internet hosts and services to further understand an attackers infrastructure.