What is Continuous Threat Exposure Management?

Widespread, rapid digital transformation across industries presents a unique, unprecedented challenge when it comes to managing the sheer scale and risk of an organization’s attack surface.

Traditional vulnerability and risk management solutions lack the level of visibility and control necessary to keep environments safe and secure, calling for a new approach to vulnerability management that addresses the changed landscape and the limitations of traditional vulnerability management programs.

What is CTEM?

Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a process framework designed by Gartner to help organizations proactively evaluate the accessibility, exposure, and exploitability of enterprise IT in a consistent, repeatable, and scalable fashion. CTEM was named a 2024 Gartner Top Technology Trend because of cyber security challenges like lack of visibility into the volume of exposures, difficulty tracking issues and remediation progress across siloed environments, lack of clarity around remediation owners, and increased dependency on third party technology.

A CTEM program helps organizations shift from a reactive approach, to a proactive approach, where steps are taken to strengthen security and compliance throughout the organization proactively. 

Components of CTEM

The CTEM framework is a process made up the following five steps:

Scoping

CTEM recommends strategically mitigating risk by adopting the “attacker’s point of view” which means going beyond traditional vulnerabilities and CVEs. This starts with organizational collaboration to identify which assets and systems are most business-critical, and therefore attractive to attackers; examples could include production or development environments, cloud infrastructure, on-prem assets, APIs, or other systems that are most valuable to organizational stakeholders and attackers. This step establishes a foundational level of context and visibility and helps with prioritization later on in the process.

Discovery

The discovery stage of the CTEM process aims to uncover any and all assets and vulnerabilities that exist in your attack surface, from third-party to on-premises environments, and from misconfigurations to insecure APIs to noncompliance and more. The CTEM framework leverages the context and conclusions from the Scoping step to help you project how each vulnerability impacts the rest of your attack surface. Further, understanding the types and levels of vulnerabilities that exist in your attack surface helps organizations prepare remediation and security plans accordingly.

Prioritize

Understaffed security and development teams aside, solving for every single weakness in your attack surface is untenable and an inefficient use of time; therefore organizations need to identify their most urgent issues. Rather than solely relying on risk scores provided by their security testing tools or risk scoring systems, Gartner recommends organizations consider a combination of urgency, severity, availability of compensating controls, risk appetite, and level of risk posed to the organization as inputs to determine how critical the weakness is. Insights from the “Scoping” and “Discovery” stages of the CTEM process, like business context and asset relationships, can also be part of the equation.

Validate

The validation stage tests whether vulnerabilities and other security gaps discovered and prioritized during the earlier phases can actually be exploited in a meaningful way, by leveraging pentesting, breach and attack simulation, attack path analysis, and red teaming exercises. 

Although success varies on each organization’s level of risk acceptance, there are a few factors to look at: 

• Attack success: If the attackers could actually succeed at exploiting the discovered vulnerabilities in your organization 
• Potential impact: How far the  attacker could get into the attack path before reaching a critical asset
• Response efficacy: How effectively and efficiently the processes respond to and remediate vulnerabilities

Mobilize

The mobilization stage operationalizes the CTEM process by defining communication standards, creating process documentation, assigning roles across stakeholders, and implementing automated workflows. 

Although full automation is rarely possible or even desirable, automating basic patching or configuration changes can help organizations refocus remediation efforts toward more complex vulnerabilities. For example, in the event that a detected vulnerability has multiple fixes, the remediation team must decide which fix makes the most sense for the business. 

Mobilization is often the most difficult part of implementing the CTEM framework because it requires a change in how the organization approaches risk management as a whole.

CTEM vs. Traditional Vulnerability Management

While they’ve been in use for decades, traditional vulnerability management methods are not equipped to handle the growing complexity and dynamic nature of today’s attack surfaces. Further, traditional methods of gathering vulnerability findings are often siloed and separate from the processes used to remediate those findings. As a result, vulnerabilities are typically triaged and remediated in a manual, ad-hoc way. 

CTEM innovates on traditional vulnerability management and transforms it into a proactive, repeatable, and scalable process. By broadening the scope to consider all physical and digital assets, attack paths, likelihood of exploit, and current processes, organizations can achieve a holistic and actionable vulnerability management program that prioritizes with context and eliminates the most critical risks at a pace that works for your organization. Further, the emphasis on repeatability creates space for organizations to evaluate process efficacy and continuously improve on inefficiencies.

Benefits of CTEM

Although CTEM can take some time and resources to implement, the overall long-term benefit is monumental. According to Gartner, organizations that prioritize their security investments based on a CTEM program will realize a two-thirds reduction in breaches by 2026. 

Implementing a CTEM Program

Once again, it’s important to note that CTEM is a process framework rather than a product category, meaning that organizations should expect to leverage a variety of different platforms to enforce it. Although a mature, optimized CTEM program can take some time to build, organizations can start by knocking down silos and strengthening the weakest points of their existing vulnerability management processes. While these weak points are often prioritization and mobilization, it’s not uncommon for individual stages to vary in levels of maturity. 

Organizations can also start by leveraging the tools they already have in place. For example, after scoping the environment, security teams can add findings from external attack surface management (EASM) and breach and attack simulation (BAS) products to achieve a clearer picture of the attack surface and the attack paths that pose critical risk. In doing so, security teams are removing the boundary between findings from vulnerability scanners and the context needed to prioritize and create a holistic approach to security.