Issue 01 / Editorial Field Guide
The Marketing
Attack Surface
How to secure the agencies, platforms, data and technology behind your marketing.
16 pages · PDF · With Cytek · 2026
Free / No cost
Four places your marketing perimeter is already open
Contents
Access is the whole game.
The layer that makes every other control meaningful, and where most real-world marketing compromise actually happens.
Access
The list is the liability.
Marketing data gets treated as a working asset rather than a governed one. Every copy that gets made is real, indefinite exposure.
Data
A marketing stack is infrastructure.
The website is production infrastructure that happens to serve pages, and the access surrounding it reaches further than most teams assume.
Infrastructure
Follow the money and the identity.
Advertising platforms spend money directly, and are governed with less rigor than a corporate card while frequently moving more of it.
Money & Identity
Three things you can use the same day you read it
Field tools
The playbook
Fifteen controls, grouped and ordered so a marketing team can work through them without a security background.
Agency security scorecard
A field tool for scoring an agency, a contractor or an internal team against the controls in the guide.
Diligence questions
The question list, written so it can be sent as it stands to a current or prospective marketing partner.
A look inside
Preview
The terrain
The playbook
Field tool
Contributing cybersecurity perspective
Every increase in permission level is an increase in risk if that account is ever breached. We've walked into places where everybody's permissions are just pegged to administrator. Everybody can do everything.
Chris Burcham, CEO and President, Cytek
Cytek is a Kansas City managed IT and cybersecurity firm. Issue 01 carries their perspective alongside Seismic's, because the marketing perimeter question sits between the two disciplines and is usually owned by neither.
Get the guide
Most marketing teams have never counted how many outside parties hold live access to their systems.
The guide gives you the map, the controls and a scorecard to run the count yourself.