Enterprises today are engulfed in a relentless and ever-intensifying storm of cyber threats. These threats, which extend far beyond disclosed software vulnerabilities and CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), are a formidable challenge. Misconfigurations from complex technologies create vulnerabilities, while compromised credentials and excessive user permissions facilitate lateral movement. The list of issues to be dealt with seems endless.
While effective in addressing CVEs, legacy vulnerability management tools fall short of providing comprehensive coverage. In 2023, a staggering 28902 vulnerabilities were identified, 3821 more than in 2022. This trend of increasing vulnerabilities is a recurring theme, with more CVEs identified in 2022 than in 2021, and so on. The number of issues requiring attention continues to mount, yet the capacity to effectively address them has not necessarily increased, highlighting the urgent need for a new, more comprehensive solution.
Moreover, CVEs only represent a fraction of the issues that can put assets at risk. Issues such as weak credentials, misconfigurations, and other weaknesses account for many of the issues that can put organisations at risk.
As security tools churn out their lists, attackers are methodically navigating the environment. They possess the patience, persistence, and intelligence to exploit vulnerabilities incrementally. Defenders, on the other hand, are often caught in a reactive cycle, dealing with the latest threats rather than proactively dismantling the pathways. This asymmetry is a formidable challenge for traditional approaches, necessitating a sustainable solution.
Gartner’s Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework aims to fix this through a set of processes and capabilities that allow enterprises to continually evaluate the accessibility, exposure, and exploitability of their assets. CTEM offers a real methodology to address a list of growing problems, and organisations should become familiar with its advantages as they plan their budgets, procedures, and strategies in 2024 and beyond.
CTEM strengthens cyber resilience from the inside out by leveraging 5 steps:
● Scoping, to define business-critical assets, systems, and processes requiring protection.
● Discovery of all exposures across the infrastructure including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, risky identities, etc.
● Prioritisation analyses exposures based on exploitability, prevalence, and potential business impact to guide the improvement plan.
● Validation confirms that exposures could truly be exploited in the organisation through simulations.
● Mobilisation drives team collaboration to reduce risk by implementing controls, processes, and technology.
The iterative CTEM process involves continual discovery, prioritisation, and remediation activities. However, unlike traditional vulnerability management, which loses context once issues fall off the latest scan reports, CTEM maintains persistent recall of the environment. Progress towards risk reduction is measurable regardless of how threats evolve.
Proactively validating, prioritising, and remediating exposures also enables organisations to outpace attacker dwell time inside environments. Defenses are constantly strengthened rather than allowing new exposures to accumulate. Further, because CTEM continually relates risk back to business priorities defined during scoping, security initiatives stay aligned with reducing business disruption. Exposure management becomes a business enabler.
Another prominent benefit of CTEM is that it creates a common language around risk. Traditional vulnerability management leaves organisations unable to model the interconnectedness of exposures or understand the resulting business risk. Security teams cannot convey severity in a way that resonates with IT and the business, so both groups lack the context to make data-driven decisions on resource allocation.
Security teams can align remediation with exploitation likelihood and business criticality by providing a risk-based model to understand exposures. The data dispels uncertainty around securing complex hybrid environments and grants actionable insights, enabling teams to strengthen defenses with confidence strategically.
The “continuous” element of CTEM refers to a give-and-take relationship between the CTEM program and the associated risk remediation efforts, wherein data stemming from both aspects informs processes to enable increasingly optimal decisions about managing exposure risk. It also refers to the fact that a core element of the approach lies in continuously monitoring, assessing, prioritising, and remediating security issues.
At its core, CTEM is about continually reducing risk and improving posture measurably. This is done by expanding vulnerability management programs to include misconfigurations, identity issues, unmanaged devices, etc. To understand attack surfaces, attack paths to critical assets, and overall risk, all these environments must be considered holistically—how an attacker will view them.
By leveraging attack graphing, automated security validation, and exposure assessment capabilities, CTEM provides relevant insights across contexts and visually illustrates interconnected risks based on real-world tactics. By mapping exposures this way, defenders can better adopt the attacker mindset to see how threats link together across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
Armed with this intelligence, security leaders can develop an actionable remediation roadmap to reduce risk and augment cyber resilience systematically. Proactively strengthening defenses also enhances adaptability to respond to emerging threats across the attack surface.
In today’s complex threat landscape, enterprises can no longer allow security to be dictated by point-in-time assessments that generate unactionable lists. A continuous exposure management approach encompassing vulnerabilities alongside misconfigurations, credentials, and more is required to match attacker persistence.
CTEM breaks down communication barriers between teams while rallying them around exposures with maximum risk reduction. Establishing a comprehensive Continuous Threat Exposure Management program should be on every company’s 2025 goals list. While rigorous, it will unlock robust cyber resilience for the long term.
