CyCognito Introduces MCP Server Exposure Management to Secure AI Integration Layers Across the External Attack Surface
Palo Alto, Calif. – January 15, 2026 – CyCognito, the leader in external attack surface management, today announced MCP Server Exposure Management, a new service that helps organizations discover externally reachable Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, bringing them into asset inventory and exposure management workflows.
The rapid adoption of generative AI into production systems has made MCP servers a critical part of how AI agents access data, services and execution paths. But many of these servers are outside traditional visibility and security controls, resulting in external exposure risks that most organizations are not currently aware of. By discovering externally reachable MCP servers, CyCognito brings this emerging class of AI-related infrastructure into the same inventory and workflows used for other externally reachable services. MCP reachability becomes visible, reviewable, and monitorable over time so drift and unplanned exposure do not sit outside normal external exposure management processes.
The rise of MCP in the attack surface
According to Gartner, by 2026 more than 80 percent of enterprises will have used generative AI APIs or will have deployed generative AI enabled applications into production. MCP servers sit at the center of this shift, providing a way to broker access between AI agents and operational systems.
From an attack surface and exposure management perspective, an externally reachable MCP server is not just another endpoint. It is a dynamic, callable surface with risk that is shaped by which tools are exposed, how those tools are invoked, which downstream systems can be acted on by them, and how access controls behave in real deployments. These surfaces change through configuration updates, addition of new tools, and agent driven workflows, often outside traditional deployment and review processes.
MCP server surfaces are also highly context sensitive, with the same exposed surface taking on different risk characteristics based on the caller and the channels it is exposed over. And because the security challenge with MCP is context and not just scale, each tool can support dozens of actions, and those actions may do very different things depending on input and context. An exposed MCP server is also a small catalog of potential business operations and downstream integrations, many of which will be completely invisible to the caller. These surfaces are also more likely to change dynamically over time in response to business needs and use cases, leaving them prone to configuration and access drift in ways that make unplanned and unreviewed exposure more likely.
“The external surface created by MCP servers is going to surprise a lot of security teams. These servers are the primary way that AI agents communicate with systems, and a growing number of them are reachable from the internet,” said Amit Sheps, Product Marketing Leader for CyCognito. “MCP Server Exposure Management is a natural extension of our asset and exposure management capabilities, making it easy for teams to add these important new assets to their security and governance processes.”
AI workflows are not always known in advance and can change over time. The risk profile of an exposed MCP server can change as new tools are added and flows are updated. For some organizations, AI will add to the context explosion that makes review and governance of the external surface hard at scale. For others, new capabilities like CyCognito’s MCP Server Exposure Management are an opportunity to close the longstanding asset visibility gap and dramatically improve the security of modern cloud applications.
To learn more about CyCognito’s MCP External Exposure Management Service, please visit: https://www.cycognito.com/blog/.
About CyCognito
CyCognito is an external exposure management platform that reduces risk by discovering, testing and prioritizing security issues. The platform scans billions of websites, cloud applications and APIs and uses advanced AI to identify the most critical risks and guide remediation. Emerging companies, government agencies and Fortune 500 organizations rely on CyCognito to secure and protect from growing threats. For more information, visit https://www.cycognito.com.