In today’s threat landscape, where cyber-attacks are increasingly sophisticated and pervasive, organizations face the daunting challenge of securing a constantly expanding attack surface. Traditional vulnerability management (VM) programs, while necessary, are no longer sufficient on their own. They often struggle to keep pace with the dynamic nature of threats and the complexity of modern IT environments.
This is where continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) comes into play – an approach that shifts the focus from merely identifying vulnerabilities to understanding and mitigating exposures across the entire attack surface.
Implementing a continuous threat and exposure management process
CTEM is a term originally coined by Gartner, who defined it as, “a five-stage approach that continuously exposes an organization's networks, systems, and assets to simulated attacks to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses.”
The five stages of CTEM as defined by Gartner are:
Scoping: This involves understanding the full threat landscape by incorporating tools like external attack surface management (EASM) and network scanning. However, it emphasizes the need to think in terms of business context, focusing on crown jewels, critical applications, and understanding what matters most to the organization.Discovery: This stage focuses on discovering assets and profiling the associated risks. It requires visibility into both cloud and on-premises environments and extends beyond identifying vulnerabilities to include coverage gaps, misconfigurations, and other security risks.Prioritization: Since not all risks can be addressed simultaneously, this phase involves prioritizing issues based on a combination of factors like severity, exploitability, and potential business impact, to determine what should be tackled first.Validation: This stage emphasizes investing in tools that help validate security controls and map potential attack paths. It includes the use of breach and attack simulation (BAS) tools, continuous assessment services, controls monitoring, and attack path mapping to test ..Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
