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Introduction
From Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management: Why the Shift Matters
Vulnerability Management (VM) has conventionally formed the backbone of cybersecurity for many years, serving the singular purpose of enabling organizations to identify and fix known vulnerabilities in systems and software. However, the rapid expansion of attack surfaces and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats have rendered VM insufficient on its own to provide comprehensive protection for a modern organization [1].
To address these challenges, Exposure Management (EM) has emerged as a solution that identifies, prioritizes, validates, and facilitates the remediation of cyber exposures across an organization’s unique IT environment. EM shifts from the reactive mindset of VM to a proactive, context-informed approach that considers all dimensions of risk. Guided by the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework, Exposure Management redefines how organizations manage security by expanding beyond vulnerability identification to include exploitability validation, real-world threat intelligence, and business impact prioritization. The evolution into EM can finally bridge the gaps left by VM and enable organizations to adopt a more dynamic and risk-aligned security strategy.
In this blog, we will discuss the reasons why vulnerability management alone is no longer sufficient, how Exposure Management addresses its shortcomings, and a transition guide for organizations looking to grow into Exposure Management.
Three Main Reasons Why Vulnerability Management Alone Isn’t Enough
Vulnerability management (VM) is the process of finding and mitigating security weaknesses, but it is no longer capable of protecting modern organizations on their own [1]. Here are the top three reasons why vulnerability management alone isn’t enough. For the sake of objectivity, no comparisons are made in this section. If you’re looking for a direct comparison based on the CTEM framework, skip ahead to the fourth section.
Reason 1.
Expanding Attack Surfaces
While VM is focused on identifying and patching software, system, and application vulnerabilities, this narrow scope inherently misses other critical exposures, such as misconfigured security controls, exposed sensitive data, open ports, unnecessary services, and third-party risks, and the list can go on.
The challenge is further compounded by the rapid expansion of digital ecosystems, driven by [2]:
- cloud adoption,
- remote work environments,
- SaaS applications, and
- interconnected operational technologies.
These developments and changes, in turn, dramatically expand organizations’ attack surfaces, adding dynamic and overwhelming amounts of risk. Thus, in the modern digital environment, it is safe to say that only sticking to traditional vulnerability management practices is no longer beneficial, except for checking the boxes for compliance. Organizations need a more comprehensive view that provides context about the entire attack surface, exposure risk, business impact, and exploitability.
Reason 2.
Vulnerability Management Cannot Provide a Proof of Exploitibility
The majority of traditional vulnerability management practices depend on the use of legacy scoring systems in vulnerability prioritization, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). Though it represents a standardized way to measure vulnerability severity, it is burdened with inherent shortcomings related to the real-world exploitability of the identified vulnerabilities.
CVSS scores are calculated based on a set of static criteria such as the theoretical complexity of an exploit, versus the potential impact if exploited. They don't take into account critical factors like
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Active Exploitation: The vulnerability might be actively targeted by threat actors or malware campaigns in certain regions and industries. Alternatively, there might be a vulnerability with a CVSS score of 10.0, but if exploitation is practically infeasible for an adversary, no active exploitation may be observed, rendering the risk posed by the vulnerability practically low.
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Attack Feasibility: The feasibility of exploiting a vulnerability in an organization's specific environment depends on factors such as the presence and effectiveness of implemented security measures. For instance, even if a high-severity web application vulnerability is detected in your IT environment, your Web Application Firewall (WAF) may immediately block the initial step of an exploitation attempt. As a result, an adversary cannot penetrate your internal network, effectively reducing the risk posed by the vulnerability to zero. Therefore, proving the feasibility of an exposure being used in an exploitation campaign is crucial for ensuring efficient remediation efforts.
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Business Context: Business value of the asset being targeted and the potential damage if compromised.
Without these extra dimensions, most VM systems provide lists of prioritizations that, by no means whatsoever, actually or effectively represent the real risk posed to organizations. This easily can result in wasting time and resources on low-real-world-risk vulnerabilities and overlooked exposures carrying high risk. Furthermore, without proof of exploitability, security teams are not provided with insights into how the attackers can use the vulnerabilities to prepare an organization for dealing with critical threats.
Reason 3.
Even Big Security Teams Cannot Address Every Vulnerabilities
As stressed in reason two, vulnerability management tends to leave a large gap in prioritization, even in organizations with strong security teams. It often spits out a very long list of vulnerabilities with high CVSS scores, many of which are categorized as critical issues. Compliance requirements or internal security baselines further aggravate this situation by demanding the remediation of critical issues within strict SLAs, sometimes as short as 24 hours.
However, with no concrete proof provided by the vulnerability assessment tools around exploitability, security teams traditionally are forced to "destructive" patches or mitigations unselectively to address vulnerabilities—a process that takes days or even weeks. This is where operational disruption truly occurs, as patches are applied without knowledge of real-world risks. This approach is resource-intensive and unsustainable—no organization, regardless of team size, can fully remediate hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities in this manner.
The outcome is operational fatigue—security teams become overwhelmed by the volume of identified vulnerabilities, most of which may not pose an immediate threat. It also leads to insensitivity or desensitization to vulnerability reports, leaving high-risk issues unaddressed and the organization vulnerable to critical attack vectors.
How Exposure Management Addresses the Shortcomings of Vulnerability Management
Exposure Management addresses the gaps in traditional Vulnerability Management by offering a holistic, context-driven approach to identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating risks. The key ways in which Exposure Management overcomes the shortcomings of Vulnerability Management are outlined below. For a more detailed exploration, feel free to proceed to the next section.
Comprehensive Visibility Across Attack Surfaces: Vulnerability Management is like a bird burying its head in the soil, only focusing on what’s directly in front of it—software and system vulnerabilities—while missing the broader landscape of threats. Exposure Management, on the other hand, soars above like a hawk, scanning the entire attack surface, ensuring visibility across hybrid environments, SaaS applications, operational technologies, and even unpatchable attack surfaces, such as external brand data or supply chain risks.
Risk Prioritization with Real-World Context: Unlike VM's reliance on legacy scoring systems like CVSS and EPSS, exposure management does not leave a prioritization gap behind. It integrates real-time threat intelligence, business impact, and environmental context. By environmental context, this refers to evaluating the feasibility of an exposure being exploited by adversaries within the organization's specific security environment. This holistic approach ensures security teams will focus their time, effort, and resources on the most critical threats and not waste their time on exposures that are either non-exploitable (a.k.a theoretical).
Validation of Exploitability: One key differentiator is exposure management practices’ use of validation to identify the risks that actually matter to an organization, and therefore improve the risk management process. Exposure management validates vulnerabilities through adversarial exposure validation tools and technologies such as Breach and Attack Simulations (BAS), automated pentesting and red teaming, and attack path mapping [2]. By confirming if / how attackers could exploit identified exposures in organization’s unique IT environment, EM eliminates non-actionable risks from the remediation process, focusing resources on risks that matter the most. Hence, it results in effective and efficient application of the mobilization of the remediation efforts.
Effective Mobilization of the Security Teams: As stressed earlier, VM provides no proof of exploitability and therefore requires addressing identified exposures flagged as critical within a short period (such as 24 hours or 2–3 days of SLA). Exposure Management, on the other hand, validates whether these exposures are actually exploitable, even after listing hundreds or thousands of critical exposures. For instance, an initial 1,000 identified exposures might be reduced to 5 actually critical, 20 medium, and 130 low, etc. Following this advanced filtration, exposure management assigns the identified exposures based on their criticality for effective mobilization of different security teams. For example, while Team A addresses highly critical exposures within a 24-hour SLA, Team B can handle medium-level exposures within a week.
Through well scoping factoring business risk, assessing the whole attach surface of an organization, validating and prioritizating the risks that are critical the most, and efficiently mobilizing the security teams for the remediation steps, EM transforms VM’s reactive approach into a proactive and business-aligned security strategy. This reduces operational fatigue and enhances resilience in the face of evolving threats.
Transitioning from Vulnerability Management to with Exposure Management with the CTEM Framework
Here is the comparison of vulnerability and exposure management practices based on the CTEM framework.
1. Scoping: From Static Compliance Checks to Dynamic Risk Alignment
VM Approach: Static and compliance-driven, often limited to predefined IT systems and regulatory requirements. However, this approach inevitably leaves gaps, as it fails to account for dynamic risks such as emerging cloud environments, third-party dependencies, and rapidly evolving technologies.
CTEM Approach: Scoping is understood as the process of setting the boundary and area of focus for assessing, prioritizing, and acting on risks within an organization's attack surface, and also to ensure security efforts are pointed toward the needs and objectives of the business. According to Gartner, exposure management transforms scoping into an ongoing and iterative process centered on business-critical risks and organizations’ expanding attack surface. Compared to traditional VM, this opposes being bound by pre-defined IT systems or compliance-driven goals.
Action Steps: To implement smooth growth into an exposure management practice, organizations should dynamically set the scope of their CTEM implementations according to their moving priorities and organizational goals.
In addition, it is advised that such scope can be guided by critical assets [2]:
- cloud integrations,
- software as a service (SaaS) platforms,
- third-party ecosystems,
- operational realities, including ransomware threats, industry or region-specific threat actors and malware campaigns,
- and business continuity risks.
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For organizations that are building on their existing vulnerability management practices might want to ask themselves certain questions as provided below:
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In conclusion, in terms of scoping, exposure management surpasses vulnerability management by ensuring that decisions are actionable and intricately aligned with the organization’s dynamic operational priorities and reputational resilience, effectively addressing an evolving and expansive attack surface.
2. Discovery: From Limited Visibility to Holistic Insights
VM Approach: VM discovery focuses on predefined IT assets and known vulnerabilities. It relies on periodic scans and compliance-driven assessments, often neglecting less visible or emerging risks such as cloud environments, third-party dependencies, and digital assets. This limited view leaves significant blind spots in identifying modern attack surfaces and fails to adapt to the rapid pace of digital transformation.
CTEM Approach: In CTEM, discovery step is the process of continuously identifying and mapping all potential attack surfaces, vulnerabilities, and exposures across an organization's digital ecosystem to enable proactive risk management.
Action Steps: To transition from vulnerability management to exposure management, discovery processes must evolve to encompass the full complexity of an organization’s attack surface. Unlike the traditional VM approach, EM requires a broader, more dynamic perspective.
By leveraging advanced tools like the following, Exposure Management transforms discovery into a dynamic and proactive process.
- Attack Surface Management (ASM)
- External Attack Surface Management (EASM)
- Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM)
- SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)
- Digital Risk Protection Tools & Services (DRPT/S)
These tools and technologies provide organizations with real-time, comprehensive visibility into their exposures, ensuring that both visible and hidden vulnerabilities are consistently identified and prioritized.
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Organizations seeking to mature into Exposure Management must focus on discovery that not only identifies assets but also evaluates their security posture and potential risk. Here are four critical questions to guide this transition [2]:
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3. Prioritization and Validation: Shifting from Theoretical Vulnerabilities to Prioritized Business Risks
In the CTEM framework, prioritization and validation focus on prioritizing exposures by exploitability and business relevance while verifying their impact and the effectiveness of security measures through continuous testing and real-world simulations.
VM Approach: Vulnerability management relies on static, theoretical methods for prioritization of the identified vulnerabilities, such as CVSS or exploit prediction scoring. While these legacy scoring systems provide a baseline understanding of severity and the utmost harm that they cause to an organization, they inherently fail to account for real-world exploitability in an organization’s unique IT environment. This is because validation in a traditional VM cannot factor in whether the security controls are blocking the attack or if prerequisites are met for an attacker to exploit a particular vulnerability. Therefore, since no sort of validation is provided, due to compliance requirements, security teams might be forced to address each and every vulnerability that was scored, for instance, higher than 8 in terms of CVSS—even though the real risk of the identified vulnerability is much less. Thus, this approach often leads to operational inefficiencies, as remediation efforts are not aligned with actual risks.
CTEM Approach: Exposure Management transforms prioritization and validation into a dynamic, real-time process that targets actively exploited exposures in a business-critical context. By combining contextual awareness and Adversarial Exposure Validation technologies, Exposure Management ensures that prioritization and validation reflect real-world adversary behavior and align with operational priorities.
Action Steps: Organizations can factor in the following considerations when they are prioritizing their identified exposures.
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Threat Intelligence: Leverages real-time insights into active attack campaigns to identify and focus on vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild.
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Business Context: Assesses the role of assets in operational continuity, linking exposures to their potential business impact.
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Exploit Prediction Scoring Systems (EPSS): Uses predictive models to evaluate the likelihood of exploitation based on historical and emerging trends, enabling data-driven prioritization.
However, these factors alone are not enough to deliver a proper prioritization, to grow from traditional VM into an efficient Exposure Management, organizations also factor the proof of feasibility of an exposure being used by an adversary. This proof is best provided by Adversarial Exposure Validation tools.
Adversarial Exposure Validation:
Adversarial Exposure Validation is the cornerstone of EM. Unlike VM, which often considers vulnerabilities as theoretical risks, EM emphasizes validating exploitability and operational impact through controlled simulations. This bridges the gap between prioritization and actionable risk management.
Key tools and technologies for Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV):
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Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS): Simulates the real-world tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of adversaries and malware campaigns observed in the wild to validate the feasibility of exploiting prioritized vulnerabilities.
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By leveraging solutions powered by Breach and Attack Simulation, such as the Picus Security Control Validation module, you can determine whether the identified vulnerabilities have a chance of penetrating your preventative technologies, such as NGFW, IPS, WAF, etc. If they manage to infiltrate, are your detective solutions, such as IDR, XDR, EDR, and SIEM, logging or alerting the corresponding attacks?
Thus, BAS solutions allow your organization to have data-driven visibility into the feasibility of an exposure being exploited in your unique environment. By showcasing the real risk it poses to your organization, your security team can efficiently allocate the time and resources required for remediation. This not only drastically reduces the operational burden on your security team but also eliminates potentially disruptive patches, thereby protecting business continuity. |
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Automated Penetration Testing: Tests vulnerabilities in real time within the organization’s unique environment, identifying seemingly isolated vulnerabilities that can be chained together to reach the crown jewels of your organization.
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By leveraging automated pentesting technologies like Picus Attack Path Validation, you gain the utmost visibility into the steps an adversary can take in your compromised environment. By chaining seemingly isolated vulnerabilities together, these technologies can reveal the stealthiest attack paths an attacker could use to reach your crown jewels, such as domain admins, domain controllers, etc.
By providing objective-based automated pentesting simulations, such as ransomware readiness and domain admin compromise scenarios, Picus APV tests your organization's readiness against the most disruptive attack scenarios. Acting like a real-life sophisticated attacker without requiring shortcuts through implemented security measures such as firewalls, these solutions deliver the most realistic stress testing for your environment in a safe and non-destructive manner. |
Once you validate your exposures through AEV technologies, you can efficiently and effectively prioritize the ones that pose the greatest risk to your organization, leading you towards the final step: mobilization of your security teams for remediation efforts.
4. Mobilization: From Reactive Fixes to Proactive Collaboration
In the CTEM framework, mobilization refers to the activation of security teams to remediate validated exposures based on the risk they pose to your organization.
VM Approach: Mobilization in traditional vulnerability management often relies on isolated, compliance-driven fixes. These fixes are typically reactive and narrowly focused on resolving issues flagged by vulnerability scans or regulatory mandates. Automation plays a role but is usually limited to addressing straightforward vulnerabilities, leaving more complex, strategic issues unaddressed. Furthermore, VM rarely integrates remediation efforts with broader organizational workflows, leading to silos between IT, security, and other stakeholders.
CTEM Approach: Exposure Management takes mobilization to a strategic level, emphasizing collaboration, alignment, and a balance between tactical responses and long-term risk reduction. Rather than applying blanket fixes, EM ensures remediation efforts are tied to broader organizational priorities and operational realities.
Action Steps: Here are four actionable steps to transition from vulnerability management to exposure management, enabling effective and efficient remediation of identified exposures.
- Enforce a Cross-Functional Collaboration: EM fosters partnerships between IT teams, security operations, and nonsecurity departments to align remediation strategies with business objectives. Engaging stakeholders ensures that solutions are realistic and actionable within the organization’s structure.
- Assign the Remediation Efforts Based on Severity: Exposure Management practices mobilize different security teams based on the severity of validated exposures to optimize resources more effectively. For instance, if a validated exposure has a risk score higher than 8, it would be assigned to Team 1 with a 24-hour SLA. On the other hand, exposures with a risk score between 5 and 8 would be considered medium and assigned to Team 2 with a 1-2 week SLA. By avoiding the manual patching of every identified exposure, Exposure Management enables security teams to plan their resources more efficiently.
- Perform Risk-Based Prioritization: By focusing on exposures most likely to impact critical business functions, EM mobilizes resources where they are most needed, avoiding wasted efforts on low-risk vulnerabilities.
- Consider Tailored Remediation Options: Unlike VM’s one-size-fits-all approach, EM offers multiple remediation paths, including mitigation, reconfiguration, or patching, each assessed for feasibility and impact. This practice can reduce the number of required manual patches and allow security teams to apply the appropriate security suggestions or fix misconfigured security solutions.
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At Picus, we understand that even organizations with large security teams cannot afford to patch every security vulnerability identified. Sometimes, even when the number of vulnerabilities is drastically reduced through validation, the remaining ones can still be challenging to handle due to the risk they pose to business continuity. We believe that by implementing both vendor-neutral and vendor-specific mitigation suggestions, security teams can block potential attacks immediately, preventing attackers from even gaining access. Thus, even if there is vulnerable software within the internal network on a particular asset, by blocking the attack paths an attacker could exploit, we eliminate the risk.
No foothold means no exploitation, thereby buying the security team the time they need. For this reason, the Picus Mitigation Library provides mitigation suggestions that are both vendor-neutral and specific, pre-tested to ensure they work as intended. With wide integration and supported technologies, Picus not only improves the security posture but also eliminates the time and effort required for mitigation research and validation by the corresponding security teams. |
How Picus Drives the Evolution from Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management
At Picus, we realize the need to grow traditional vulnerability management to a more comprehensive and proactive approach. Exposure Management perfectly takes the torch for this understanding to include identification, verification, and prioritization of exposures with respect to actual business risks. That means: with a full spectrum CTEM strategy, your security teams will be able to transition from reactive vulnerability scans to continuous discovery and actionable insights, so they are enabled to focus on what truly matters: mitigate critical exposures to reduce risk, increase resilience.
The Picus Security Validation Platform enables such evolution through offering solutions like Security Control Validation, which is powered on our Breach and Attack Simulation, and Automated Penetration Testing. These tools empower organizations to continuously assess and validate their security posture against modern attack vectors, bridging visibility gaps and ensuring holistic exposure management. Picus provides the insights required to prioritize, validate, and remediate the vulnerabilities effectively by seamlessly integrating into your existing security ecosystem, assisting you to transform your traditional vulnerability management into a robust exposure management framework.
Exposure Management (EM) and Vulnerability Management (VM) differ in scope and approach. VM focuses on identifying and remediating software and system vulnerabilities using static scoring methods like CVSS, often neglecting real-world exploitability and business impact. EM, guided by frameworks like CTEM, provides a broader, context-driven strategy, addressing all exposures—including misconfigurations, third-party risks, and unpatchable assets. EM prioritizes risks based on exploitability, threat intelligence, and operational impact, ensuring targeted remediation. This makes EM more dynamic and aligned with modern cybersecurity needs.
Exposure Management is important because it provides a comprehensive, proactive approach to cybersecurity, addressing all potential risks beyond traditional vulnerabilities. By incorporating real-world exploitability, business impact, and threat intelligence, Exposure Management ensures that security teams focus on the most critical exposures. This reduces wasted effort, operational fatigue, and overlooked risks. Unlike traditional methods, it adapts to evolving attack surfaces, enabling organizations to prioritize, validate, and remediate threats effectively, thereby enhancing resilience and aligning security efforts with business goals.
Adversarial Exposure Validation tools are used in Exposure Management to simulate real-world attack scenarios and validate the exploitability of identified exposures. Tools like Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and Automated Penetration Testing assess how vulnerabilities can be exploited in an organization’s unique environment. They provide actionable insights by testing security controls, mapping attack paths, and identifying critical risks. This ensures remediation efforts focus on high-risk exposures, reducing operational burdens and enhancing preparedness against sophisticated adversaries.
