Shadows are dark and dangerous places where bad guys attack anything or anyone they find. In 2026, AI will increase the number and size of shadows, together with the entire external attack surface. External Attack Surface Management (EASM) is the process of finding and managing every asset an organization exposes to the internet. Those assets may be known (and therefore documented and may be secured) or unknown (and therefore invisible and almost certainly insecure). While EASM covers both categories, we are primarily concerned with the invisible assets. “This includes domains, servers, APIs, and cloud assets that may not be tracked internally,” says Chris Boehm, field CTO at Zero Networks. “It matters because most companies do not have a complete inventory of what is visible from the…