Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is an automated process for identifying potential vulnerabilities and security gaps in an organization’s digital attack surface. CTEM solutions continually and automatically scan an organization’s IT assets for configuration errors, vulnerabilities, and other issues that can be reported to the corporate security team and remediated before they can be exploited by an attacker.

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Why is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Important?

With the rise of cloud computing, companies can quickly deploy and take down new resources on an as-needed basis. Additionally, DevOps’ rapid deployment processes mean that new vulnerabilities can be introduced into corporate IT systems on a near-continual basis and that configurations may drift and become less secure over time.

These factors combine to create a corporate digital attack surface that may incorporate an ever-changing array of security gaps that attackers can exploit. CTEM enables companies to be proactive about managing these risks by automatically identifying and prioritizing potential issues for remediation.

Five Stages of CTEM Implementation

The process of implementing a CTEM program can be divided into five main stages, including:

Scoping: During the scoping phase, the organization defines the intended scope of the project. This includes identifying which assets require monitoring and protection to support the needs of the business.
Discovery: After defining the scope of the engagement, the security team identifies related assets. These assets are then evaluated for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other security risks to the business.
Prioritization: During the prioritization stage, the identified vulnerabilities are ranked based on the threat that they pose to the business. Often, this is based on potential exploitability and the anticipated impacts of the threat.
Validation: During the validation stage, the organization tests the effectiveness of its existing security controls against identified threats. This can include penetration testing, red teaming, and similar exercises.
Mobilization: Finally, the organization takes steps to mitigate the identified vulnerabilities. This is accomplished in order of importance based on the results of the prioritization and validation steps.

Benefits of CTEM

Implementing CTEM provides various benefits to the organization, such as:

Proactive Risk Management: CTEM enables security teams to identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by an attacker. This eliminates the risk that they pose and is more cost effective than remediating a cybersecurity incident after the fact.
Real-Time Risk Visibility: CTEM performs continuous monitoring of an organization’s digital attack surface and the potential vulnerabilities it contains. This provides the organization with real-time visibility into its current security posture, which is essential as environments and risks constantly change.
Reduced Cyberattack Impacts: CTEM allows organizations to identify and fix the most pressing or dangerous security risks in their IT environments. This reduces the probability and potential impacts of cyberattacks targeting the organization.
Improved Compliance: Regulatory compliance requires protecting sensitive information and the systems that hold it against potential attacks. CTEM enhances compliance by reducing the potential attack vectors that an attacker can target to exploit an organization.
Enhanced Decision-Making: CTEM provides in-depth visibility into an organization’s current cybersecurity posture. This data can be invaluable for informing decisions about cybersecurity investment and an organization’s current exposure to cybersecurity risk.

CTEM Program Implementation Best Practices

Properly implemented, a CTEM program can dramatically reduce an organization’s risk of cyberattacks. Some best practices for designing and implementing a CTEM program include:

Be Proactive: CTEM enables an organization to identify vulnerabilities before they are the cause of a cyberattack. Being proactive about implementing CTEM and mitigating the vulnerabilities it identifies reduces an organization’s cybersecurity risk exposure.
Use Automation: CTEM is designed to perform attack surface management at scale. Accomplishing this requires the use of advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to detect potential threats to the organization.
Look Outside: Some of the biggest security risks that a company faces are third-party risks. CTEM should look at both internal and external security risks.
Prioritize Risks: The scope of modern IT environments means that they can contain more vulnerabilities than a security team can address. Risk prioritization is essential to ensure that the most significant and impactful vulnerabilities are fixed first.
Remediate Vulnerabilities: CTEM only provides visibility into the security gaps in an organization’s IT environment. To provide real value, security teams should use this information to close these gaps.