An Overview of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

Quick Overview: Discover the importance of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) in our blog, offering insights into its proactive approach to cybersecurity. This proactive approach empowers organizations to continuously monitor, assess, and address threats in real-time, ensuring enhanced resilience against evolving cyber threats. Let’s read more about CTEM and also understand what Gartner thinks about CTEM.

Every organization asks security leaders to create a well-defined vulnerability management protocol to protect their data, systems, and users from cyber-attacks.

With an evolving cybersecurity landscape, CISOs and cybersecurity experts are on the verge of developing proactive strategies to mitigate and remediate critical vulnerabilities on their attack surfaces.

As cyber criminals have gotten smarter and faster, organizations are prompted to reassess their legacy systems, governance practices, and overall security posture. This ensures alignment with the latest industry standards and best practices, safeguarding against the increasingly advanced tactics employed by cybersecurity experts.

With the expansion of digitization and the widespread adoption of cloud technologies, the potential touchpoints for cyber-attacks have increased, consequently encouraging the attack surface. With the rise of vulnerable systems, compromised data, and unauthorized assets, a consistent and continuous security strategy with agility and accuracy is needed.

CISOs and cybersecurity experts have understood the importance of this approach and implemented it due to its streamlined and compelling nature. By prioritizing the swift remediation of critical risks, organizations can better defend against evolving threats and bolster their overall security posture.

Welcome to Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), a cutting-edge approach to cybersecurity that goes beyond the conventional methods of threat detection and mitigation. But what exactly is CTEM framework, and why should you care about it? Let’s understand in detail in this article.

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What is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a set of processes, capabilities, or frameworks that security leaders can put into place to identify, assess, and mitigate threats within an organization’s networks and systems.

CTEM is a strategic approach to automate continuous monitoring of attack surfaces, allowing organizations to test their security posture and identify potential vulnerabilities before they are exploited by cybercriminals. CTEM is like having a vigilant sentinel securing your digital assets 24/7, tirelessly scanning the horizon for any signs of danger.

In 2022, Gartner first introduced the term, Continuous Threat Exposure Management – a give-stage approach that continuously exposes an organization’s networks, systems, and assets to simulate attacks to detect vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

With the CTEM framework, you can stay one step ahead of threats, preemptively addressing vulnerabilities and fortifying your defenses against potential attacks.

According to Gartner, CTEM is a framework that surfaces and actively prioritizes whatever most threatens your organization.

Gartner stated, “By 2026, organizations prioritizing their security investments based on a continuous exposure management program will be three times less likely to suffer from a breach.”

This means that if organizations don’t take serious action or consider an alarming situation, they might be at greater risk. Therefore, it’s essential for them to take a proactive approach to detect and prevent potential threats and vulnerabilities.

CTEM program utilizes advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to help end-users assess the accessibility, exposure, and exploitability of their digital assets by cyber attackers. The primary goal is to identify and prioritize these threats, empowering businesses to take proactive actions to secure their assets effectively.

It’s important to understand that Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is not a standalone solution, but rather a comprehensive paradigm integrated through a blend of automated tools and manual testing. This framework consists of various activities like red teaming, penetration testing, and vulnerability scanning.

Why Should You Care About CTEM?

Many cybersecurity experts and CSOs face challenges in identifying and monitoring all security vulnerabilities in their businesses since the attack surface has continued to broaden and diversify. Moreover, implementing cloud, social media, and supply chain management has further widened attack surfaces, resulting in a layer exposure that’s difficult to patch for businesses.

So here, relying only on proactive security solutions or security assessments will help you address patchable exposure areas. The other un-patchable areas will be untouched by these solutions.

Therefore, Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) aims to enhance an organization's overall security stance by proactively identifying and resolving vulnerability areas before malicious actors can exploit them.

Five Stages of CTEM Program

The CTEM program consists of five phases, which are essential to complete the cycle and for your organization’s success. Let’s have a look at these stages.

Source: gartner.com

Scoping

Scoping is the first stage of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), which aims to understand and identify the most important assets and potential impacts to the business. Also, it helps you determine the risks associated with those assets. As your program matures, its scope will naturally evolve and broaden.

This process involves identifying critical attack surfaces and required input from various stakeholders, including leaders from IT, Legal, Development, GRC, Research and Development, Product, and Business Operations teams.

Discovery

Once the scoping stage is complete, the next phase is Discovery.

This discovery phase involves identifying and cataloging all vulnerable resources, including software, database, hardware, IoT, and network infrastructure. During this phase, with the utilization of IT discovery tools and methods, businesses audit all IT resources and identify weaknesses and flaws by conducting vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and other security audits.

Prioritization

As Gartner highlights, the goal of exposure management is not to fix or remediate every issue but to identify and address the threats most likely to be exploited against an organization. This leads us to the next phase of CTEM – Prioritization.

In this phase, every risk (which is discovered in the discovery phase) associated with assets is prioritized based on their criticality to the business operations. Now, businesses commonly employ a risk assessment methodology to evaluate the severity and probability of each threat to their assets.

Validation

The Validation stage is a very important stage for businesses as vulnerability to threats has been effectively controlled and decreased.

During this phase of CTEM, security experts implement strategies to address the most critical vulnerabilities and threats identified. This may include implementing additional safeguards, updating software, or adjusting security settings.

Similar to the discovery stage, it’s important to engage with stakeholders - IT professionals, security experts, and other employees to understand their perspective on potential vulnerabilities. It allows businesses to make needed improvements to enhance their security posture.

Mobilization

The final stage of the CTEM strategy, the Mobilization stage, entails defining the scope of the initiative, establishing goals and objectives, identifying key stakeholders and required resources, and conducting a readiness assessment to gauge the organization's existing cybersecurity and exposure management maturity level.

This assessment is crucial as Gartner warns against excessive reliance on automation, potentially aiding in the detection of vulnerabilities before the deployment of CTEM.

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Advantages of Implementing CTEM Program in Your Organization

As per the above statement given by Gartner, we can clearly state that vulnerability management with an always-on approach is important to monitor, identify, and remediate network attack surface issues.

Following are the benefits businesses can leverage by implementing a CTEM program.

Proactive Risk Management

The primary benefit of implementing CTEM framework is proactive risk management. CTEM approach continuously scans and monitors the business’s infrastructure to proactively address vulnerabilities and threats. This early detection helps organizations to take preemptive actions to mitigate risks. As a result, it reduces the possibility of cyber attacks.

Prioritization of Threats

Not every threat poses the same risk level for an organization. While some may present significant risks, others may be less severe. CTEM empowers organizations to prioritize threats according to their potential impact, enabling more effective allocation of resources.

Organizations may efficiently allocate resources toward the most significant risks by assessing each threat's severity and potential damage. By using a strategic approach to threat management, resources are used more effectively, and the most dangerous threats are dealt with faster.

Enhanced Cyber Resilience

Being an iterative methodology, CTEM pushes organizations to continuously reassess and improve their security posture. This continuous improvement process fosters increased cyber resilience over time, as organizations get insights from each assessment and adjust their defense accordingly. Thus, CTEM ensures that defenses remain up-to-date, and organizations can maintain the highest level of cyber resilience.

Reduced Costs

This is the benefit every stakeholder desires. The costs associated with a breach, particularly a significant one, are numerous: potential ransomware payments, the need to restore backups that may not capture current data, loss of customers due to reputational damage, and more.

A CTEM program that successfully reduces risk, enhances security posture, utilizes automation, and minimizes the fallout from breaches. As a result, it can save significant amounts of money in the long term.

Enhanced Adaptability

CTEM programs are inherently scalable, allowing businesses to address emerging or evolving technology and cyber threats. This ensures that protection remains continuous and relevant, which is essential in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Gain Actionable Insights

CTEM approach produces actionable insights from real-time threat data, aiding organizations in implementing efficient remediation measures. The data-driven nature of CTEM ensures that decisions are informed by the most current threat intelligence, resulting in more effective and targeted remediation efforts.

Importance of CTEM Approach

The effectiveness of CTEM is directly linked to the scale of the issue and the enhancements organizations experience upon its implementation.

We found one research report which states:

• There are more than 250,000 vulnerabilities in larger enterprises.
• Organizations only tend to resolve about 10% of those open vulnerabilities. It means they leave other vulnerabilities untouched.
• However, 75% of exposures do not result in further asset compromise—they are essentially "dead ends" for attackers. Additionally, only 2% of exposures lead to critical assets being compromised.

According to the Total Economic Impact Study by Foster from 2022, organizations with an appropriate solution in place experience a 90% reduction in the likelihood of a severe breach and can achieve a return on investment (ROI) of up to 400%.

Key Practices to Follow for Proper CTEM Program Implementation

Let’s learn in detail about the practices that help organizations implement CTEM program in an ideal way.

Establish your Objectives in a Clear Way

Begin by defining the specific goals you want to achieve with your CTEM program. This may include reducing the attack surface, enhancing threat detection, or improving vulnerability management. Always set your goals and clearly define what you expect after the implementation of CTEM program, then put strategies into action accordingly.

Assess and Prioritize Risks

Conduct an in-depth risk assessment to detect and evaluate the critical assets, vulnerabilities, and potential threats to your enterprise. This process involves assessing the potential impact and likelihood of different risks. Prioritize these risks based on their severity to focus on the most significant threats that could impact your organization the most.

Integrate Threat Intelligence

Incorporate threat intelligence feeds into your CTEM program to keep updated on emerging threats, vulnerabilities, and attack methods. This information helps with context for the data collected and helps improve the accuracy of threat detection. Integrating threat intelligence enables you to proactively address and work on potential threats based on evolving threat landscapes.

Enhance Incident Response Capabilities

Develop a comprehensive and foolproof incident response plan that outlines procedures for identifying, containing, and resolving security incidents. Make sure that the plan comprises roles and responsibilities for team members and that it is uniformly tested and updated. Leverage Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools to automate and streamline incident response processes, improving efficiency and reducing response times.

Focus on Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Ensure that your CTEM program aligns with relevant regulatory and industry compliance requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS without fail. Maintain thorough documentation of your CTEM processes, policies, and procedures to support audits and demonstrate compliance.

Popularity of CTEM

A survey conducted by Gartner Peer Connect revealed that 71% of organizations could reap the advantages of adopting a CTEM approach, with 60% of respondents either already implementing a CTEM program or contemplating doing so.

Leave Traditional Methods of Cybersecurity Aside in the Evolving Threat Landscape Implement Vulnerability Assessment

Gartner’s Ideology on CTEM

According to the Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends report, organizations that prioritize their security investments based on a continuous threat exposure management program are projected to achieve a two-thirds reduction in breaches by 2026.

Challenging the conventional "detection-based" approach, CTEM argues that focusing on events rather than posture is unsustainable in the long term, as attackers have proven that. Only a prioritized, continuous, threat-based approach will yield success in the long run.

In short, adopt the CTEM approach.

Additionally, Gartner outlines a five-step process for organizations to effectively manage their exposures. Among these steps, the following are considered critical:

• Moving beyond vulnerability management to comprehend critical assets and how they can be attacked.
• Establishing an ongoing, continuous process.
• Prioritizing findings according to real risk and impact on the environment, from an attacker's viewpoint.
• Implementing and validating actions based on the above considerations.

Key Elements for CTEM Program

There are essential key elements that contribute to making a CTEM program successful, which are:

• Digital risk protection service
• Vulnerability assessment
• Breach and attack simulation
• Penetration and testing as a service
• Red teaming

Merger of Effective Threat Exposure Management with CTEM

With the rise of cyber-attacks and data breaches, organizations are witnessing a rise in threat management. The threat landscape becomes increasingly complex, and organizational attack surfaces are expanding.

Many roadblocks are coming into businesses’ goal, which require balancing long-term cyber resilience with maximizing return on investment. Therefore, an effective CTEM program that integrates digital risk protection and continuous security testing methods like agile pen testing can help you achieve this balance.

By enhancing detection and response initiatives with Security Validation and Exposure Awareness capabilities, a CTEM framework offers more profound insights and enables continuous refinement of security posture optimization priorities.

This merger shifts the traditional threat management approach from reactive to proactive, from point-in-time to continuous, and from focusing solely on "what" to understanding "why" and "how." As every CISO understands, maintaining a robust security posture is an ongoing approach, and CTEM facilitates this process, making it more attainable, efficient, and impactful.

Embrace CTEM with ZeroThreat

Continuous Threat Exposure Management – CTEM is a modern approach that helps organizations achieve cyber resilience through continuous assessment and remediation. CTEM helps organizations take a proactive approach against critical cyber threats with advanced attack techniques. And that’s where the most advanced vulnerability scanner – ZeroThreat comes in.

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