Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

As businesses transform digitally, cyber threats are evolving faster. The takeaway isn’t that threats are more sophisticated: it’s that traditional, reactive vulnerability management solutions are rarely effective. 

Continuous threat exposure management is a process that can effectively address this problem. According to Gartner, by 2026, organizations prioritizing “their security investments based on a continuous exposure management program will be 3x less likely to suffer a breach.”

This article explains key information regarding CTEM, including its phases, pros and cons, and challenges of adapting it. 

What is CTEM?

Short for continuous threat exposure management, CTEM is a modern security management process introduced by Gartner to help organizations improve their security posture in today’s non-stop evolution of attack surfaces.

CTEM introduces a more proactive approach that continuously monitors, assesses, prioritizes, and resolves security issues by improving threat exploitability. This is in direct contrast to traditional reactive vulnerability management programs that simply detect and address cybersecurity issues. 

Gartner’s emphasizes the objective of CTEM:

“to get a consistent, actionable security posture remediation and improvement plan that business executives can understand and architecture teams can act upon.”

Therefore, we can say that CTEM is not a dedicated technology, solution, or tool that organizations can buy from a vendor. Instead, it is a carefully designed five-step approach that combines critical risk prioritization and validation and improves the organization's cyber resiliency.

(Understand how vulnerabilities, threat & risk come together.)

Traditional vulnerability management programs vs. CTEM

The traditional way of managing vulnerabilities can be seen as a reactive approach. In this lens, you apply remedies after you’ve detected a threat. Also, assessing security risks was not a continuous process — it’s something you assessed periodically.

Today, though, when every attack surface is evolving non-stop, such reactive vulnerability management does not adequately reduce the organization's exposure to vulnerabilities. 

With CTEM, you focus instead on identifying threats before they can be exploited. How do you do that? By continuously monitoring and assessing for vulnerabilities. This enables organizations to respond to security risks faster than previous approaches. Thus, CTEM is a proactive and continuous approach.

Even though traditional processes cover all areas or digital assets of the organization, they often lack a deeper assessment of many focus areas. CTEM, in contrast, focuses on the entire attack surface of the organization, deeply assessing them. (This is not unlike threat intelligence you may already gather.)

With the current velocity of digital transformation, it is quite hard for traditional approaches to adapt to prioritize the threats. They are becoming less effective in combating growing cyber threats. CTEM has a more systematic and practical approach for continuously improving the priorities. 

Five steps of CTEM

CTEM is a five-step approach composed of scoping, discovery, prioritization, mobilization, and validation phases. Let’s examine what encompasses each step of implementing a comprehensive CTEM program. 

Step 1. Scoping 

The first step of the CTEM process is identifying the scope of the organization’s attack surface. This requires organizations to expand beyond the scope of traditional programs, including all possible digital assets rather than physical devices and software applications traditionally considered. 

Gartner describes two major areas for scoping for organizations that are new to this process. 

• The external attack surface. All the entry points that attackers can enter into an organizational digital asset.
• SaaS security posture. Due to the increased remote working trend in the past few years, organizations have increasingly adopted Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms to host their applications and data. There can be several security loopholes in such applications. Therefore, it is critical to include them under the scope of CTEM. 

(Related reading: attack surface management & SaaS security.)

Step 2. Discovery

After the scoping process, the discovery phase focuses on the in-detail identification of all assets and vulnerabilities related to the defined scope. That should not only include visible and most obvious assets but also include all the hidden assets.  These can include:

• Online code repositories such as GitHub or Bitbucket, where attackers can identify code vulnerabilities
• Corporate social media accounts that attackers can use social engineering techniques to expose
• Vulnerabilities of third-party software and applications
• Cloud platforms

Also, apart from digital and physical asset discovery, organizations must perform a detailed assessment of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations of these assets to evaluate their risk profiles.

Also, other risks — such as operational weaknesses and subtle risks — are discovered in this phase.

Beware: this Discovery step is often confused with the initial phase, which can cause this program to fail. Organizations must understand that it is not about the number of assets and vulnerabilities. Instead, focus on the right scoping, which depends on your business impact and your risks. (This customization matters the most because is what makes the third step successful.)

Step 3. Prioritization

Prioritizing is another crucial part of the successful CTEM process. This step aims to identify what high-value assets need to be prioritized because everything does not need to be included in the immediate mobilization and validation plans.  The prioritization should be based on several critical factors, such as:

• The asset or vulnerability to be fixed
• Risk and security levels
• Risk tolerance
• Compensating controls available

Step 4. Validation

This step includes carrying out simulated attacks to assess the impact of current security settings:

• Validate if the current security controls and response plans can identify and mitigate the identified risks in expected velocity.
• Ensure they are actual vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.

This step aims to get agreement from the stakeholders on the possible improvement srcs.

Step 5. Mobilization

The final step involves mobilizing the CTEM finding by putting everyone on the same page and removing the obstacles to realizing it. It is not about setting up some fancy automatic system that fixes security problems — its goal is to create a smooth and well-defined process.

Organizations must make it easy for teams to take what they have learned about security risks and do something about them without hassle.

During this phase, organizations must work on getting their security automation to work with already existing automation processes. Ensure that our security efforts and risk management plans align with the business's goals.

(Learn how SOAR can help you orchestrate across the business.)

Key benefits of CTEM

Shifting from traditional vulnerability management approaches to CTEM offers several benefits to organizations.

Improve cyber resilience. CTEM involves a comprehensive risk assessment that includes not only obvious and hidden assets. Also, it is an iterative process that enables organizations to constantly evolve their security posture. Hence, CTEM ensures organizations will maintain the highest level of cyber resilience. 

Proactively manage risks. Relying on reactive approaches becomes inadequate if more advanced and innovative cyber threats emerge. CTEM helps organizations anticipate risks before they materialize, thereby reducing the impact of security incidents.

(Learn about proactive and defensive offensive opportunities.)

Improve the adaptability for threats. With ever-evolving cybersecurity threats and a fast-paced digital landscape, security controls could soon become outdated. CTEM ensures that organizations can adapt to cybersecurity threats that can evolve in real time. 

Strategically align security with business goals. CTEM enables organizations to keep the security protocols in sync with their business goals. To elaborate, traditional security procedures may hinder business operations by being too restrictive or not aligning well with business workflows. On the contrary, CTEM considers how security measures can support and enhance business operations rather than acting as a barrier.

Save money. Costs incurred due to security breaches and issues include recovery, regulatory costs, and reputational damages.  CTEM significantly reduces costs associated with security breaches by proactively identifying and mitigating them. 

Generate actionable insights. CTEM is a data-driven approach. That can use real-time threat data to get insights into cyber threats. These insights can be used to validate the impact of the implemented controls. Resultantly, organizations can build more robust security strategies with informed decision-making. 

Challenges of implementing CTEM

Implementing the CTEM is not an overnight process. It involves careful planning, decision-making, and facing the challenges of implementing CTEM. Common challenges associated with CTEM include:

Lack of skills

CTEM requires cybersecurity professionals with various skills, from technical expertise to risk management and compliance knowledge. Organizations may have to look for new talent or invest in upskilling existing staff.

Lack of understanding and collaboration between security and non-security teams

Because CTEM is a holistic approach to improving the organization’s security, it requires effective communication between non-technical and technical teams. All stakeholders must understand the CTEM process and how it aligns with business objectives. Sometimes, embracing the collaborative approach necessary for CTEM to be effective can be challenging.

(Learn about these models for organizational change.)

Resource and budget limitations

The scope of CTEM is higher than traditional approaches. Organizations may need to cover the vulnerability of additional digital resources. This may require significant investment in infrastructure personnel and computational resources.

(Know the difference: capital expenses vs. operating expenses.)

Overwhelming experience

Sometimes, security validations and assessments can be overwhelming. For example, performing security validations with additional identified areas can sometimes be overwhelming.

Embrace CTEM, enable resilience

CTEM is a modern approach to achieving organizational cyber resilience through continuous assessment and remediation. With increasingly increasing cyber threats evolving with sophisticated attack techniques, CTEM helps organizations take a more proactive approach.

This five-phase approach’s core expands the threat identification into more areas and prorates them based on important factors discussed in the article. It provides many benefits, especially in cost reduction and aligning with business goals. At the same time, the risks discussed here must not be overlooked but addressed appropriately.