AI risk and security management is unsurprisingly Gartner’s number one strategic technology trend for 2024. But you might be less familiar with number two: Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). Coined by Gartner in 2022, CTEM isn’t just another buzzy acronym – it’s a powerful process that can help continuously manage cyber hygiene and risk across your online environment. With digital attack surfaces expanding all the time, the appeal of automated and ongoing risk management is clear. This article clarifies what CTEM is and how to implement Continuous Threat Exposure Management.

If you’re already CTEM-curious or want to catch up on a tech trend that’s only getting bigger, you’re in the right place. We’ll break down the five key stages within CTEM and explain why it’s more than a techy buzzword; it has genuine real-world value for helping security teams identify and resolve security risks. In Gartner’s words: “By 2026, organizations that prioritize their security investments through a CTEM program will be three times less likely to experience a breach”.

What is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)? 

Gartner defines CTEM as: “a five-stage approach that continuously exposes an organization’s networks, systems, and assets to simulated attacks to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses.” This differentiates Continuous Threat Exposure Management from traditional vulnerability management projects, which often fall short in providing organizations with a comprehensive action plan. These projects tend to generate long lists of vulnerabilities with generic remediation guidance, making it difficult for organizations to actually address the real risks they face.

CTEM offers security teams a deeper understanding of their external attack surface and how to continuously manage their threat exposure. This goes beyond simply applying security controls; it involves establishing an ongoing process of discovery and remediation driven by real-time threat intelligence. With critical risks often lurking unnoticed within digital infrastructures, continuous monitoring and management are essential components of a successful CTEM and cybersecurity strategy. 

CTEM vs. CVSS

While CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) may offer some prioritization and evaluation of vulnerabilities in a standardized fashion, it fails to focus on the true potential impacts to an organization. CTEM prioritizes vulnerabilities based on their significance to the organization, which helps to create consistent and actionable security improvement plans.

How it works: The five stages of CTEM  

CTEM involves five key stages: scoping, discovery, prioritization, mobilization, and validation. However, before you begin picturing a complete overhaul, we can assure you this CTEM guide isn’t a whole new concept. The five stages of CTEM are a framework and proactive approach to implement CTEM efficiently. It helps you to break things down into manageable compartments and focus on the business-critical aspects first. A continuous improvement is the goal.

1. Scope: Identify and scope the infrastructure in your organization that needs to be analyzed and protected.
2. Discover: List all vulnerable assets within the defined scope. 
3. Prioritize: Evaluate the risk associated with each asset and their potential impact on the business. 
4. Validate: Assess how potential attackers can exploit each identified exposure, how monitoring systems may react, and if a further foothold could be gained.
5. Mobilize: Define the scope for resolution, setting actionable goals and objectives. 

But how does this work in practice in a real organization with a sprawling attack surface containing many unknown assets? We’ll walk through how each of these stages looks with real-world examples from the Outpost24 Exposure Management Platform.

How to implement Continuous Threat Exposure Management: Outpost24 helps you put CTEM into practice

While organizations can’t simply “buy CTEM” there are a defined set of solutions to help support the implementation of a CTEM program. Let’s go through each of the phases of CTEM and use the Outpost24 platform as an example, showing which modules of the platform you can use in each stage: 

1. Scoping with External Attack Surface Management (EASM)

While many organizations have well-defined lists of assets, there are almost always unknown or forgotten assets that they’re unaware of. For example, a new domain set up by marketing for a specific customer campaign or a test server in the cloud used by developers. While they served a genuine business purpose, they may be unknown to the security team and expose exploitable vulnerabilities.

The best way to get a complete view of both known and unknown assets in the scoping stage is through External Attack Surface Management (EASM). Outpost24’s EASM solution discovers critical assets across your entire attack surface and identifies cyber risks in an automated and continuous way. Using EASM to discover all assets connected with the organization may even help to highlight business processes that weren’t initially considered for the CTEM program.

EASM gives a clear and defined picture of your attack surface and the assets that need to be considered going forward.

2. Discovery with the help of Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM), Web Application Security and Password Auditor

Once you’ve identified all known and previously unknown assets and determined which are in scope for the CTEM program, the next step is to discover the vulnerabilities in each. There are several factors that need to be considered to discover the associated risks. Depending on the assets involved, these could include (but aren’t limited to):  

• Weak or compromised Active Directory passwords 
• Network and application vulnerabilities  

For each CTEM step, the Outpost24 Exposure Management Platform is configured to continuously monitor all of the networks, applications, passwords and cloud service providers that are in-scope to determine the threats to be considered and prioritized for remediation.

Our platform provides a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities for your systems, software and passwords in a single platform leveraging our RBVM, Application Security and Password Auditor solutions to enable organizations to identify vulnerabilities across their assets and systems in the defined scope in step one.

3. Prioritization with Threat Intelligence  

A key aspect of the CTEM philosophy is that it’s not possible for organizations to remediate every vulnerability they find. Instead, they need to deploy their limited resources to continuously focus on addressing the risks most likely to inflict damage on the organization. One of the challenges faced by security teams when they realize that they don’t have enough resources is simply knowing where to start. A clear prioritization of potential risks is necessary to execute and implement CTEM step-by-step.

And with integrated Threat Intelligence data, organizations can easily identify cyber threats earlier in the attack chain. For example, flagging stolen credentials as soon as they are discovered. The output is then prioritized based on threat intelligence-based risk ratings to allow security teams to triage the vulnerabilities and focus on the most critical first. These include:

• Threat actors involved
• Stolen or leaked credentials
• Tools and campaigns  
• Historical record of exploitation  
• Malware used to exploit the vulnerability.  

Leveraging threat intelligence information provides decision makers with a complete picture of the associated risks from the hackers view and identify imminent threats. The risk-based score gives a good indication of how likely a vulnerability is to be exploited in the next 12 months.  When organizations are using our platform to prioritize resource allocation for vulnerability remediation, their decisions are informed by the most up-to-date risk analysis of the threat landscape for effective prioritization and remediation.

4. Validation with targeted testing

After identifying the key assets and vulnerabilities, it’s time to determine where the most significant threats are and where remediation efforts should be focused.  To help with this, the Outpost24 Exposure Management Platform offers application security testing, penetration testing and red teaming services to test, analyze, and verify the levels of exploitability of the vulnerabilities identified. The vulnerabilities that are validated as significant are the ones that should be prioritized, letting security teams focus on the biggest risks.

5. Mobilization of stakeholders with CTEM insights

Reporting plays a crucial role in implementing and enabling a CTEM approach, and the Outpost24 Exposure Management Platform helps provide actionable insights into an organization’s entire attack surface, including infrastructure assets, applications, and users. Armed with a prioritized and validated list of vulnerabilities that need to be remediated, security leaders are able to help stakeholders understand the situation and get the right resources to address them.  

The action-based and continuous reporting feature offers visibility into the evolving threats targeting the organization over time, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of the security landscape. This helps build collaboration and ultimately leads to improved cyber investment decisions. 

Thinking about getting started? We can help 

We help organizations use the Outpost24 Exposure Management Platform to implement or re-energize a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) program that suits their needs and goals. Our CTEM experts can assist you with this transition and provide guidance from scoping all the way through to mobilization. Get in touch to see how we can help with your exposure management program