Subsidiary & Multi-Organization Management

Modern enterprises frequently have complex infrastructures spread across many domains and business units. ProjectDiscovery’s platform is designed to give security teams instant visibility into the entire organizational attack surface, including assets belonging to subsidiaries, acquired companies, and separate brands. It does so by automating asset discovery and correlation on a global scale. The platform acts as a centralized inventory where all web properties, cloud resources, and external facing systems tied to an organization are cataloged together, regardless of which subsidiary or team they belong to.

ProjectDiscovery built its cloud platform with end-to-end exposure management workflows that continuously discover assets and monitor them in real-time. This means as your organization grows – launching new websites, spinning up cloud services, or acquiring companies – the platform automatically updates your asset inventory and keeps track of new potential entry points. In short, ProjectDiscovery provides a “single pane of glass” for enterprise security teams to oversee multi-organization infrastructures.

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Challenges in Traditional Subsidiary Asset Discovery

Tracking assets across multiple organizations or subsidiaries is notoriously difficult when done manually. Security teams traditionally had to compile lists of subsidiary domains and networks from internal knowledge or public records, then run separate scans for each – a time-consuming and error-prone process. Some common challenges include:

• Incomplete Visibility: Large organizations might have dozens of subsidiaries or brand domains, and each may host numerous applications. Manually mapping all these entities is a huge challenge. In practice, many enterprises have “hundreds or even thousands of related entities,” making it “difficult to get a clear picture of their full attack surface”. Important assets can be overlooked simply because they were not on the main corporate domain.

• Constant Change: Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures mean the set of assets is constantly evolving. Without continuous updates, asset inventories become outdated quickly. IP addresses and domains can change ownership or get spun up and down rapidly in cloud environments. Keeping track of these changes manually is untenable.

• Fragmented Data Sources: Information about subsidiaries is often scattered (e.g. in financial databases, press releases, WHOIS records). As a result, mapping out which domains or systems are owned by your company (versus third parties) can require extensive research. This fragmentation leads to blind spots in security monitoring.

• Risk of Unknown Assets: Perhaps the biggest risk is that unknown or unmanaged assets can lead to security incidents. If a security team is only monitoring the primary organization’s domains, a forgotten website under a subsidiary could become an easy target. As one security engineer described, without a centralized view “new assets could pop up without our knowledge, creating potential vulnerabilities like subdomain takeovers”. In other words, attackers might exploit an obscure subsidiary’s forgotten cloud bucket or an old acquisition’s server if the defenders aren’t even aware it exists.

These challenges mean that traditional approaches (spreadsheets of subsidiaries, manual scans, etc.) often fail to provide complete coverage. Security teams end up reactive – finding out about a subsidiary’s exposure only after an incident or external report. Clearly, a more automated, scalable solution is needed for subsidiary and multi-organization asset management.

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How ProjectDiscovery Solves This Problem

ProjectDiscovery’s platform introduces automated features that eliminate the manual legwork of subsidiary asset discovery. It leverages external data and intelligent correlation to map out an enterprise’s entire digital footprint across all related organizations, with minimal user input. Key capabilities include:

• Automated Subsidiary Correlation: ProjectDiscovery integrates with the Crunchbase API to automatically identify which companies and domains are associated with your organization. As soon as you onboard, the platform pulls in known subsidiaries and related entities from Crunchbase’s extensive corporate database. This means security teams immediately see a list of subsidiaries and their known domains without having to manually research corporate filings or news articles. By using this external intelligence, ProjectDiscovery can map subsidiaries to assets and help track associated assets across [your] entire corporate structure.

• Seamless Onboarding of Subsidiary Assets: The platform presents this extended view during onboarding – giving users an instant snapshot of their organization’s broad footprint as they set up their account. Instead of starting with a blank slate, an enterprise user logging into ProjectDiscovery for the first time might immediately see that the platform has identified, for example, “SubsidiaryX.com, SubsidiaryY.net, and BrandZ.com” as belonging to their company. This jump-starts the asset inventory by automatically including the web properties of all child organizations. Such visibility, right at onboarding, ensures no major branch of the business is initially overlooked.

• Recognition of Brands and Owned Domains: Subsidiary discovery in ProjectDiscovery isn’t limited to exact company names – it also helps surface related domains or brands. For example, if your organization owns multiple product brands each with their own website, the platform can recognize those as part of your attack surface. It correlates various clues (DNS records, SSL certificates, WHOIS info, etc.) to cluster assets by ownership. As a result, security teams get a unified view of everything “owned” by the broader organization, even if operated under different names.

• Continuous Enrichment and Updates: ProjectDiscovery’s asset correlation is not a one-time static pull. It is continuously being enhanced. Upcoming improvements will use reverse WHOIS lookups to find additional owned domains and associated entities that might not be obvious from corporate listings. This will further expand coverage by catching assets that share registration details or contact emails with the organization. The platform is also opening up these discovery capabilities via API for the community, so its subsidiary detection engine will keep getting smarter over time. For the security team, this means the asset inventory grows and updates automatically as new information surfaces – without manual effort.

By automating subsidiary and multi-organization asset discovery, ProjectDiscovery saves countless hours of manual mapping and drastically reduces the chances of missing a part of your attack surface. Security teams no longer need to maintain separate inventories or perform ad-hoc research whenever the company expands; the platform handles it for them in the background. All assets across the parent company and its subsidiaries funnel into one consolidated inventory for monitoring.