CISO Tribune

Vendor comparison · 2 companies

Bishop Fox vs Censys

Bishop Fox sells offensive security services, including penetration testing and continuous security testing. Censys supports investigations with real-time Internet infrastructure visibility and historical context. CISO Tribune files both under External attack surface management. This page sets the two records side by side: what each sells, where it is based, who owns and funds it, the customers it names and its recent news, each fact numbered to its source.

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  • Bishop Fox
  • Censys
Bishop Fox vs Censys: Products, Customers and Funding Compared
Bishop FoxBishop Fox sells offensive security services, including penetration testing and continuous security testing.bishopfox.comCensysCensys supports investigations with real-time Internet infrastructure visibility and historical context.censys.com
What it sells
  • Cosmos[3][7][13][14]Bishop Fox's cloud-native technology platform and the foundation of its offensive security services.
  • Penetration Testing Services[4]Bishop Fox penetration testing across applications, networks, products, cloud, and AI systems.
  • Application Penetration Testing[3][9][14]Testing of web, mobile, and other applications, including an AI-powered portfolio option.
  • External Penetration Testing[10]Perimeter testing that emulates targeted adversaries.
  • Hardware Penetration Testing[4][11]Testing of connected devices and their ecosystems.
  • Continuous Security Testing[5][8]Managed continuous testing that Bishop Fox ties to Continuous Threat Exposure Management programs.
  • AIMap[3]Open-source tool built by Bishop Fox for testing exposed AI endpoints.
  • Censys Platform[3][8][17][18][19][20][21]Delivers visibility and intelligence for triage, threat investigation, adversary hunting and Internet exposure management.
  • Censys ASM[8]Reveals Internet-facing assets, services and exposures across all 65,535 ports.
  • Adversary Investigation[3][4][5][9][17][19]An add-on module to the Censys Platform to detect, analyze and track threat infrastructure.
  • cencli[20]A command line tool for running search queries, looking up assets and performing aggregations.
Categories
Headquarters
Tempe, United States[2]Ann Arbor, United States[2][21]
Founded
2005[1][4][8]2017[1]
Ownership and funding
Not stated on its pagesNot stated on its pages
Named customers
Not stated on its pagesNot stated on its pages
Recent news
  • February 10, 2026Bishop Fox announced an updated application penetration testing service that combines its expert testing teams with its proprietary AI engine, Cosmos AI.[14]
  • September 22, 2026Censys announced an expanded global Channel Partner Program and investments to accelerate its channel-first growth strategy.[14]
  • July 22, 2026Censys announced record first half 2026 growth, reflecting growing enterprise adoption of Internet intelligence.[13]
  • July 8, 2026Censys expanded its Internet Map to include real-time DNS visibility.[25]
  • June 18, 2026Censys announced its expansion into security operations, enabling organizations to use its internet intelligence across security workflows.[26]
  • June 18, 2026Censys announced its expansion into security operations, enabling organizations to use its Internet intelligence across security workflows.[12]
G2 and Gartner Peer Insights
  • G2: Not stated on its pages
  • Gartner Peer Insights: Not stated on its pages
  • G2: listed, seen November 10, 2026[6]
  • Gartner Peer Insights: Not stated on its pages
Who it fits
From its own pages, Bishop Fox sells mainly to organizations that want offensive security testing of their applications, cloud, networks, devices, and AI systems. Bishop Fox says most enterprises manage many applications with constrained budgets and headcount. Customers it describes include a healthcare technology company moving to SaaS, an energy provider facing nation-state threats to critical infrastructure, and a financial services organization. Its hardware testing is aimed at healthcare devices, consumer tech, and industrial systems. Bishop Fox says it works with customers who are looking to safely deploy AI, release a new app or service, or validate corporate governance. Cosmos is delivered as a managed platform, so customers do not deploy or maintain it themselves.From its own pages, Censys sells to private and public sector security teams. Censys describes a plan for threat hunting and CTI teams looking to hunt, track and engineer detections for adversary campaigns and infrastructure. Censys describes a plan for enterprises that want to use Censys data across alert triage, IR, threat intel and detection engineering. Censys offers purpose-built internet intelligence with specialized datasets for government specific investigations and exposure management requirements. Censys offers Single Sign-On through a SAML-based integration to Enterprise and Government users.
Last verified
September 27, 2026September 27, 2026

Where they overlap

  • Bishop Fox and Censys are both filed under External attack surface management.
  • Both are headquartered in the United States.

Where they differ, field by field

  • Bishop Fox's primary category is Penetration testing and red team services; Censys's is External attack surface management.
  • Censys is also filed under Threat intelligence.
  • Bishop Fox lists Cosmos, Penetration Testing Services, Application Penetration Testing, External Penetration Testing, Hardware Penetration Testing and 2 more. Censys lists Censys Platform, Censys ASM, Adversary Investigation and cencli.
  • Bishop Fox is headquartered in Tempe, United States. Censys is headquartered in Ann Arbor, United States.
  • Bishop Fox was founded in 2005. Censys was founded in 2017.

What it sells: Bishop Fox

What Cosmos does[3][7][13][14]
Cosmos builds and verifies a living inventory of an organization's external attack surface. It integrates with customer workflows through Jira and ServiceNow, syncing validated findings into existing ticketing systems. Bishop Fox operates and manages Cosmos as part of its services, and customers do not deploy or maintain it.
What Penetration Testing Services does[4]
Bishop Fox penetration testing spans applications, networks, products, cloud, and AI systems. Engagements cover web and mobile apps, cloud environments in AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes, and IoT, consumer, commercial, and industrial devices.
What Application Penetration Testing does[3][9][14]
Bishop Fox runs in-depth manual and dynamic analyses of Android and iOS devices and apps, guided by OWASP testing methodologies. Bishop Fox AI-Powered Application Penetration Testing delivers validated, expert-reviewed findings across an entire portfolio.
What External Penetration Testing does[10]
Bishop Fox says its External Penetration Testing emulates targeted adversaries and results in discovery of defensive gaps, including likelihood of exploitation and business impact. Testing extends to public cloud storage services and peripheral web apps.
What Continuous Security Testing does[5][8]
Bishop Fox provides continuous security testing that it describes as integral to a successful Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) program. Its managed services identify, prioritize, and help remediate business-impacting exposures.
What AIMap does[3]
AIMap is an open-source tool built by Bishop Fox. It discovers, scores, and tests exposed AI endpoints.

What it sells: Censys

What Censys Platform does[3][8][17][18][19][20][21]
Censys Platform has API endpoints for integrating Platform functionality with a customer tech stack. Censys Platform uses a language called Censys Query Language. Censys Platform includes a web property dataset covering name-based assets on the internet, including websites, APIs and web-based applications.
What Censys ASM does[8]
Censys ASM uses first-party scanning to find Internet-exposed assets, including services on nonstandard ports, self-signed certificates, hosts in residential networks and dangling DNS records. Censys ASM sends alerts on changes such as new hosts and services, open ports and reissued certificates. Censys ranks risks by severity, category and affected asset.
What Adversary Investigation does[3][4][5][9][17][19]
The Adversary Investigation module is an add-on to the Censys Platform for organizations to detect, analyze and track threat infrastructure. Actions that use CensEye to discover related infrastructure for a host, web property or certificate are only available to users with access to the Adversary Investigation module.

Questions about Bishop Fox and Censys

What do Bishop Fox and Censys sell?
Bishop Fox sells Cosmos, Penetration Testing Services, Application Penetration Testing, External Penetration Testing, Hardware Penetration Testing and 2 more. Censys sells Censys Platform, Censys ASM, Adversary Investigation and cencli.
Are Bishop Fox and Censys in the same category?
They share External attack surface management. Bishop Fox's primary category is Penetration testing and red team services and Censys's is External attack surface management.
Where are Bishop Fox and Censys headquartered?
Bishop Fox is headquartered in Tempe, United States. Censys is headquartered in Ann Arbor, United States.
When were Bishop Fox and Censys founded?
Bishop Fox was founded in 2005. Censys was founded in 2017.
Who are Bishop Fox and Censys sold to?
From its own pages, Bishop Fox sells mainly to organizations that want offensive security testing of their applications, cloud, networks, devices, and AI systems. From its own pages, Censys sells to private and public sector security teams.
What have Bishop Fox and Censys announced recently?
February 10, 2026: Bishop Fox announced an updated application penetration testing service that combines its expert testing teams with its proprietary AI engine, Cosmos AI. September 22, 2026: Censys announced an expanded global Channel Partner Program and investments to accelerate its channel-first growth strategy.

About Bishop Fox

Bishop Fox sells offensive security services, including penetration testing and continuous security testing. Bishop Fox says it has 20 years of offensive security experience and thousands of customer engagements. Bishop Fox was founded by ethical hackers. Bishop Fox says it is behind offensive security tools including Sliver and CloudFox. Bishop Fox applies agentic AI to its offensive testing, and Bishop Fox assesses models and architectures as part of securing AI and LLM initiatives.

Bishop Fox penetration testing spans applications, networks, products, cloud, and AI systems. Bishop Fox offers assessments of AI systems tailored to the customer's use case, priorities, and development lifecycle. Bishop Fox's application offering includes web and mobile app penetration testing, AI-powered portfolio assessments, and secure code review. Application testing covers web, thick-client, e-commerce, single page applications, and APIs. Bishop Fox runs in-depth manual and dynamic analyses of Android and iOS devices and apps, guided by OWASP testing methodologies. Bishop Fox AI-Powered Application Penetration Testing delivers validated, expert-reviewed findings across an entire portfolio. Bishop Fox application testers are fluent in programming languages such as Python, C, C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, GO, Swift, PHP, Rust, and Objective C.[9]

Bishop Fox cloud testing goes beyond configuration reviews to identify critical and exploitable paths in AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes environments. Bishop Fox network testing simulates real-world attack scenarios to uncover perimeter weaknesses and identify how an attacker could gain access to internal networks. Bishop Fox says its External Penetration Testing emulates targeted adversaries and results in discovery of defensive gaps, including likelihood of exploitation and business impact. Bishop Fox hardware and software testing covers IoT, consumer, commercial, and industrial devices. Hardware testing inspects devices down to electronic components including PCBs, chips, storage, debugging interfaces, and bus protocols. Bishop Fox experts test strategic partners and 3rd party vendors.[11]

Bishop Fox provides continuous security testing that it describes as integral to a successful Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) program. Bishop Fox managed services identify, prioritize, and help customers remediate business-impacting exposures. Bishop Fox Attack Surface Discovery continuously finds, validates, and attributes perimeter assets. Bishop Fox Emerging Threat Testing delivers a per-environment verdict. Bishop Fox says its red team work lets customers face the tactics real adversaries use and see how their team responds. Bishop Fox customizes its reporting, weekly status reports, and post-engagement reviews to the unique needs of the customer's organization.[12][13]

Cosmos is Bishop Fox's cloud-native technology platform and the foundation of its offensive security services. Cosmos is built on stateless microservices that auto scale to enterprise volumes, continuously discovers external assets, and routes high-confidence findings into an expert human validation pipeline. Cosmos builds and verifies a living inventory of an organization's external attack surface. Cosmos runs daily automations that validate reachability and protocol behavior so customers see only verified, visible assets. Cosmos captures evidence in the form of technology fingerprints, screenshots, and service metadata. Cosmos uses tenant- and organization-level cloud connectors. Cosmos integrates with customer workflows through Jira and ServiceNow, syncing validated findings into existing ticketing systems. Validated outputs are surfaced through the Bishop Fox Portal, which provides an asset inventory, confirmed findings, indicators of exposure, and a triage workflow integrated with customer ticketing and collaboration systems. Bishop Fox operates and manages Cosmos as part of its services, and customers do not deploy or maintain the platform themselves.[7]

Bishop Fox built AIMap, an open-source tool that discovers, scores, and tests exposed AI endpoints. Sliver is a cross-platform general purpose implant framework. Sliver supports asymmetrically encrypted C2 over DNS, HTTP, HTTPS, and Mutual TLS.

Bishop Fox says it helps customers who are looking to safely deploy AI, release a new app or service, or validate corporate governance. A healthcare technology company moving to SaaS needed to validate its multi-tenant cloud platform, secure connected device provisioning, and maintain visibility across a growing attack surface. An energy provider faces constant threats from nation-state actors targeting critical infrastructure. Equifax runs year-round perimeter testing to safeguard high-value data. Zoom used continuous attack surface monitoring to protect its expanding platform. Apollo selected Bishop Fox to perform a Google Security Assessment of its application, external perimeter, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment. John Deere relied on in-depth product security reviews and ongoing protection through a managed offensive security platform. Ventrilo.ai partnered with Bishop Fox for application penetration testing and AI security assessments. A financial services organization tested Bishop Fox's Cosmos AI platform against a realistic application.[7][9][13]

Bishop Fox on the record

Sources

Bishop Fox full record

  1. [1]bishopfox.comBishop Fox · bishopfox.com · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]ContactBishop Fox · bishopfox.com · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]Bishop Fox | The leading authority in offensive security… | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Offensive Security: Penetration Testing Services | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]Continuous Security Testing Services | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Red Team Services | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]Cosmos Technology Platform | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Offensive Security Services | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed November 5, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]Application Penetration Testing Services | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed November 5, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]External Penetration Testing for Network Security | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed November 5, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Hardware Security Assessments and Product Security… | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed November 5, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Bishop Fox | Tactics of Deception: Protecting Trust and PurposeBishop Fox · undated page, accessed November 5, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]Explore Customers of Our Offensive Security Solutions | Bishop FoxBishop Fox · undated page, accessed November 5, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]Bishop Fox Redefines Offensive Security at Scale with AI-Augmented Penetration TestingBishop Fox · published February 10, 2026 · Tier A

Censys full record

  1. [1]Censys introduces the ground truth for internet intelligence the censys internet map 301938734Censys via PR Newswire · prnewswire.com · published September 26, 2023 · Tier A
  2. [2]CareersCensys · censys.com · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]Censys | The Authority for Internet Intelligence and InsightsCensys · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Platform API Transition GuideCensys · published October 5, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]SAML AuthenticationCensys · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Censys Attack Surface Management Reviews & Product Details - G2G2 · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier C
  7. [7]Censys Search - CensysCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Censys | Attack Surface Management | Internet VisibilityCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]Adversary Investigation - CensysCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]Critical Infrastructure Monitoring - CensysCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Trusted by Global Leaders for VisibilityCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Censys Expands Into Security Operations with Internet Intelligence-Powered WorkflowsCensys · published June 18, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]Censys Delivers Record First Half 2026 Growth as AI Driven Demand for Internet Intelligence AcceleratesCensys · published July 22, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]Censys Transforms Global Channel Program to Accelerate Partner-Led GrowthCensys · published September 22, 2026 · Tier A
  15. [15]Censys Reviews, Ratings & Features 2026 | Gartner Peer InsightsGartner Peer Insights · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier C
  16. [16]Censys | External Exposure Management & Attack Surface MappingCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  17. [17]Platform API Transition GuideCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  18. [18]Platform FAQsCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  19. [19]Google SecOps SOAR IntegrationCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  20. [20]Platform CLI ToolCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  21. [21]Pricing | CensysCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  22. [22]Censys Built by Cybersecurity Experts for Real-Time Threat IntelligenceCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  23. [23]Censys Unveils Censys ARC, Formalizing Its Global Internet Threat Research TeamCensys · published March 10, 2026 · Tier A
  24. [24]Censys Powers SOC Modernization with Real-Time Internet Context and Risk ScoringCensys · published April 9, 2026 · Tier A
  25. [25]Censys Expands Its Internet Map to Include DNS IntelligenceCensys · published July 8, 2026 · Tier A
  26. [26]Censys Expands Into Security Operations with Internet Intelligence-Powered WorkflowsCensys · published June 18, 2026 · Tier A

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