Inside the Latest Innovations Powering Falcon Exposure Management

Today’s adversaries operate at machine speed. According to the CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report, the average eCrime breakout time — from initial compromise to lateral movement — has dropped to just 48 minutes, down from 62 minutes in the previous year. 

Traditional vulnerability management can’t keep up. Scheduled scans, static CVSS scoring, and manual triage create blind spots and operational lag, forcing security teams to spend hours stitching together telemetry, deduplicating findings, and debating what to fix while attackers move laterally. Most tools on the market were built to check compliance boxes, not stop adversaries.

This operational disconnect is what led CrowdStrike to rethink exposure management — not as another scanning engine or bolt-on dashboard, but as an evolving, platform-native capability.

CrowdStrike recently introduced exposure management innovations to help organizations identify and prioritize threats while managing the new attack surface introduced by generative AI. CrowdStrike’s Exposure Prioritization Agent, AI Discovery, Risk Knowledge Base, and continuous visibility are available in CrowdStrike Falcon® Exposure Management and delivered through the unified CrowdStrike Falcon® platform. 

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the latest Falcon Exposure Management innovations and how they’re engineered to provide real-time, high-fidelity visibility and prioritization at scale.

Prioritization Reimagined with Exposure Prioritization Agent

Falcon Exposure Management has long embedded ExPRT.AI to help security teams cut through CVE noise and focus on the 5% of vulnerabilities that carry the highest real-world risk. Now, we’ve taken that foundational innovation further.

The new Exposure Prioritization Agent provides context and enables real-time decision-making in exposure triage. In addition to the global dynamic risk scoring provided by ExPRT.AI, it offers local reasoning, continuously processes telemetry, exploits signals, and considers the business criticality of assets to generate high-confidence recommendations on the Falcon platform.

The Exposure Prioritization Agent is built to answer three questions in real time using live data:

1. What could an attacker do with this vulnerability?
   The Exposure Prioritization Agent relies on ExPRT.AI, which enriches CVE data with exploit metadata, in-the-wild activity, and reuse of attacker tooling. It uses CrowdStrike threat intelligence and telemetry-derived insight to define what the CVE could enable — for example, privilege escalation, credential harvesting, or RCE.
   

2. Can the vulnerability be exploited in this environment?
   The agent performs environment-specific checks using host- and workload-level telemetry, including running services, kernel versions, control plane exposure, open ports, and misconfigurations. It understands whether the preconditions for exploitation exist, filtering out theoretical risk.
   

3. What is the potential business impact?
   Using the context of an asset's purpose, criticality levels, and inter-domain relationships, the Exposure Prioritization Agent calculates downstream effects: Is the affected host domain-joined? Is it reachable via lateral movement? Does it run business-critical applications or store sensitive data?

These three lenses converge to produce a single “fix first” recommendation — a context-aware decision that is specific to the environment, prioritized by likelihood of exploitation, and aligned to business impact.

What This Means for Security Teams

The Exposure Prioritization Agent operates in-stream, using Falcon platform telemetry to evaluate exposures as they’re detected, without added overhead, tuning, or manual correlation. It integrates natively with these Falcon platform modules to accelerate triage and trigger workflows:

• CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR for real-time endpoint and process telemetry
• CrowdStrike Falcon® Discover and Falcon Exposure Management’s EASM capability to correlate the internal and external attack surface
• CrowdStrike Falcon® Fusion SOAR to initiate automated remediation based on prioritized risk
• CrowdStrike Charlotte AI™ to expose the Exposure Prioritization Agent logic and allow analysts to ask why a vulnerability is prioritized

With the Exposure Prioritization Agent, prioritization becomes a reasoning engine embedded in the tech stack. Security teams no longer need to write complex correlation rules or sort through hundreds of CVEs per host to guess what matters. The agent analyzes the environment, threat activity, and CrowdStrike Enterprise Graph® in real-time to automatically deliver the correct action.

In initial deployments, customers are seeing¹:

• Up to 95% reduction in remediation workload
• Accelerated triage, replacing hours of spreadsheet work
• Significant drop in false positives and low-value patching effort

Watch the demo to see how the Exposure Prioritization Agent works across real telemetry to detect exploitability conditions and automatically drive remediation workflows.

AI Discovery: Manage the AI Attack Surface

As enterprises adopt generative AI across development, IT, and data science workflows, a new layer of exposure is emerging. Copilots, LLMs, AI agents, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are deployed directly into environments where they can access sensitive data, run with elevated privileges, and create novel lateral movement paths.

CrowdStrike AI Discovery, now available in Falcon Exposure Management, brings automated, contextual visibility into this AI-powered attack surface. With a single toggle in the console, security teams can now see AI components that were previously undetected. AI Discovery surfaces:

• Local or containerized LLM runtimes
• MCP servers and endpoints
• AI-specific packages from Python (pip) and JavaScript (npm) registries
• IDE plugins and browser-based copilots
• Endpoint-integrated AI agents or assistant processes

Rather than treating these assets as anomalies or unknown binaries, Falcon Exposure Management classifies them as AI-related components and ties them into the broader asset and risk context. This helps security teams immediately understand:

• Where AI code and services are running
• What systems and data do they interact with
• Whether those components are accessible from lower-privileged systems
• Whether they are shadow AI or sanctioned models
• If they introduce lateral movement or privilege escalation risk

This is especially important for AI workloads that may not trigger traditional vulnerability detection tools — for example, model-serving frameworks embedded in web apps or dev copilots that handle sensitive prompts in-browser.

How It Works

AI Discovery operates by analyzing Falcon platform telemetry in real-time. It identifies AI-relevant packages, processes, service signatures, and command-line behaviors using a combination of:

• Application fingerprinting
• Package metadata heuristics
• Command usage patterns
• Process-to-process relationships
• Marketplace integrations and context gathering 

It's fully embedded in the Falcon platform, so there’s no need to deploy a separate AI scanner or configure discovery rules. As AI components are observed, they are automatically classified and integrated into Enterprise Graph, where their risk context (e.g., internet exposure, privilege level, proximity to sensitive systems) is continuously evaluated and reported.

Why It Matters

Security teams gain a live, integrated view of how AI is adopted across their environment and where it may introduce risk. This visibility is critical for:

• Establishing AI asset inventory and baselining usage
• Detecting unapproved or shadow AI services
• Identifying potential attack vectors introduced by overprivileged or exposed AI tools
• Supporting future compliance or governance initiatives around AI safety and usage

AI Discovery reflects the value of a real-time, platform-native architecture, enabling the delivery of additional visibility at speed without requiring additional work from security teams.

Continuous and Authenticated Visibility

In environments where asset state and threat intelligence evolve hourly, traditional scan-based visibility models fall short. Falcon Exposure Management addresses this by delivering continuous visibility — not by scanning more often, but by redefining how exposure data is collected, correlated, and updated.

Real-Time Correlation

Falcon Exposure Management monitors the environment using live telemetry from the Falcon platform and continuously updates the state of each asset, including its installed software, configurations, and package versions. As new CVEs are disclosed, Falcon Exposure Management automatically correlates them against this live asset inventory and surfaces new exposures without requiring a fresh scan cycle.

This design eliminates the visibility gaps that occur between scheduled scans and allows teams to:

• Detect newly disclosed vulnerabilities as soon as they’re relevant
• Prioritize assets impacted by high-risk CVEs in near real time
• Avoid scan storms or redundant cycles triggered by vulnerability feed updates
• Avoid stale asset data when prioritizing patching or triaging alerts

Trusted Credential Framework for Agentless Coverage

Not every asset supports agent deployment. Falcon Exposure Management extends coverage to those systems using authenticated scanning via the TrustEd Credential Framework, which securely performs assessments on:

• Legacy systems
• Network appliances
• Unmanaged servers or virtual machines (VMs)
• IoT/OT devices

Instead of long-lived domain credentials or key vault integration, Falcon Exposure Management generates ephemeral, encrypted credentials that are validated by Trusted Platform Module (TPM) security and Secure Boot. These are:

• Bound to a single scan session
• Destroyed automatically upon use
• Never persisted or exposed outside runtime memory

This provides agentless visibility without introducing credential hygiene risks while ensuring that even sensitive or compliance-critical environments can be included in continuous exposure assessments.

Unified Asset View: Agent-Based and Agentless

Both agent data and authenticated scan data feed into a unified asset model within Falcon Exposure Management. This gives defenders a consistent, continuously updated view of:

• OS and software versions
• Exposure to known CVEs
• Configuration drift or misconfigurations
• Internet exposure and network context

Because all telemetry flows through the Falcon platform’s data layer, Falcon Exposure Management can trigger alerts, playbooks, and remediation workflows immediately via Falcon Fusion SOAR when new exposures are detected across any type of asset.

Why Continuous Visibility Matters

For security teams, this architecture means:

• No waiting for the next scan cycle to detect critical vulnerabilities
• No asset types excluded due to lack of agent support
• No operational overhead for maintaining scan engines or credential vaults
• No lag between CVE release and enterprise-wide exposure awareness

Watch the latest demo to see how Falcon Exposure Management surfaces newly disclosed CVEs in real time and performs agentless assessments using the TrustEd Credential Framework. 

Risk Knowledge Base: Context Without Research Overhead

The Risk Knowledge Base, now integrated into Falcon Exposure Management, eliminates the manual research that analysts often undertake to learn about vulnerabilities. It combines CrowdStrike threat research, ExPRT.AI analysis, and data from verified external sources to provide actionable intelligence in one unified view.

Instead of digging through documentation and disparate feeds, analysts can use the Risk Knowledge Base to learn about known vulnerabilities, their contextual scoring, and exploitation activity. Each entry surfaces:

• AI-driven exploitability insights: ExPRT.AI evaluates the likelihood of exploitation based on CrowdStrike observations of adversary behavior, exploit availability, and historical attack patterns.
• Verified threat references: The Risk Knowledge Base connects CrowdStrike intelligence with curated public research to show whether exploitation has been observed in the wild or linked to known campaigns.
• Readable summaries: AI-generated descriptions explain what the vulnerability is and how it can be exploited, helping analysts distinguish between critical and low-risk issues.

In practice, this means analysts can search any CVE within the Falcon platform and receive a concise, data-backed understanding of its relevance within seconds. By embedding that knowledge directly in the Falcon platform, the Risk Knowledge Base reduces investigation time, enhances prioritization accuracy, and ensures that all analysts operate from a single, trusted intelligence baseline.

The Power of the Falcon Platform

All of these innovations operate on the same foundation: the Falcon platform’s unified telemetry and AI-driven analytics. Data from endpoints, identities, and cloud environments flows into ExPRT.AI for evaluation, while Falcon Fusion SOAR automates patching and validation.

When a new vulnerability or AI component is discovered, Falcon Exposure Management instantly correlates it, determines real exploitability, and triggers the correct action. The system continuously refines itself through this feedback loop, helping ensure that defenders always operate with the most current intelligence.

With AI-powered prioritization, continuous visibility, AI Discovery, and the Risk Knowledge Base, Falcon Exposure Management gives defenders the ability to understand exposure as it happens and eliminate it before attackers can exploit it. While other platforms stop at awareness, Falcon Exposure Management operationalizes risk intelligence, turning it into guided, automated action across the Falcon platform.

Additional Resources

• Download this guide to take the first step toward a smarter, faster, and more resilient approach to managing your organization’s exposure: Beyond the Scan: An Ultimate Buyer’s Guide to Modern Exposure Management.
• Learn more about how Falcon Exposure Management can help you discover and manage vulnerabilities and other exposures in your environments. 
• To learn more about Falcon Exposure Management features, visit our Tech Hub.

¹ These numbers are projected estimates of average benefits based on recorded metrics provided by customers during pre-sale motions that compare the value of CrowdStrike with the customer’s incumbent solution. Actual realized value will depend on the individual customer’s module deployment and environment.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post includes descriptions of products, features, or functionality which may not be currently generally available. Any such references are provided for information purposes only. The development, release, and timing of all features or functionality remain at CrowdStrike’s sole discretion and may change without notice. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. Customers should make purchasing decisions based only on services and features that are currently generally available. For more information on our existing offerings please talk to your CrowdStrike representative.