Continuous Threat Exposure Management

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is an approach to cyber security designed to help organizations obtain the context they need to prioritize exposures and manage risks more effectively.

Practically every security and IT team needs help to keep up with essential tasks such as vulnerability management. By combining data from the threat landscape and attack surface with vulnerability and security validation insights, CTEM helps organizations determine which exposures pose the greatest risk.

Garner’s CTEM definition comprises five cycle steps: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization.

A traditional approach to vulnerability management involves prioritizing common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) according to their CVSS score. A limitation of this approach, however, is that a severity score is not a rating that applies across all organizations - it can also be influenced by factors such as the number of assets affected, security controls coverage, and attack paths.

Continuous Threat Exposure Management helps overcome the limitations of traditional approaches to vulnerability management by facilitating a more holistic view and providing additional context to help security teams determine which exposures to prioritize.

Adopting a Continuous Threat Exposure management approach can require significant time and effort. To ease the process, it’s sensible to break the process into manageable steps.

Picus recommends a four-stage process: Discover, Validate, Prioritize, Optimize. By enriching security validation insights with threat intelligence, asset data, and vulnerability insights, our platform aggregates the information required to obtain a more holistic view and helps mitigate high-risk exposures swiftly and effectively.

Security validation is a core component of Continuous Threat Exposure Management because it enables security teams to quantify the effectiveness of security controls and processes.

For instance, by understanding if security controls are successfully configured to protect assets by blocking the exploitation of CVEs, security teams can obtain the additional insights they need to manage risks and prioritize the remediation of vulnerabilities.

The time it takes to adopt a Continuous Threat Management approach varies between organizations and can depend upon factors such as an organization’s existing maturity, controls, and resources. 

Adopting CTEM by integrating multiple tools, such as Threat Intelligence, Attack Surface Management, Vulnerability Scanning and Breach and Attack Simulation solutions can create additional complexity and extend the adoption period by months.

For organizations that want to speed up the adoption of CTEM, unified platforms that offer broad functionality and integrate with a wide range of controls can speed up the process significantly.