What Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a proactive approach to identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential security threats within an organization’s digital ecosystem. It involves continuously monitoring technology solutions, threat intelligence feeds, and vulnerability databases to identify threats, vulnerabilities, and exposures that adversaries may exploit. Enterprise organizations are building CTEM programs to enhance security posture and optimize security solutions against the threats that matter most.

Who Created The Term CTEM?

Gartner formally introduced the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) concept in July 2022 after recognizing a significant gap in enterprise organizations’ ability to assess and prioritize exposures and vulnerabilities against their top threats. Gartner coined the term CTEM to outline a more proactive and dynamic cybersecurity strategy emphasizing the continuous assessment and prioritization of threats to manage and mitigate potential risks more effectively.

Gartner predicts a compelling future impact:
“By 2026, organizations that have adopted a continuous threat exposure management program are projected to be three times less likely to suffer from a cyberattack compared to those that haven’t.”

This forward-looking statement underscores the potential of CTEM to significantly enhance an organization’s defensive posture against cyber threats.

KEY BENEFITS OF CTEM

CTEM Addresses several critical issues faced by organizations:

Improved Visibility:
CTEM provides real-time visibility into your environment, vulnerabilities, and threats. It solves the classic dilemma for IT and security teams — you can’t protect what you can’t see and can’t defend against what you don’t know about.

Exposure Prioritization:
CTEM enables organizations to prioritize exposures based on the likelihood of a threat and business impact. This ensures that the most critical exposures are addressed first, reducing the risk of exploitation and focusing resources where they are most needed.

Risk Reduction:
By continuously monitoring your organization’s technology stack for exposures, you can lower the likelihood and impact of a threat as exposures surface.

Enhanced Security Posture:
Regularly updating defenses against the most damaging exposures strengthens your organization’s security posture.

5 Step Cycle of Continuous Threat Exposure Management Programs

SCOPING

Define the coverage of your CTEM program by identifying which assets are critical to your business operations. Determine the data, assets, and network

DISCOVERY

Implement automated systems to scan and identify vulnerabilities continuously across your environment. This includes discovering unpatched vulnerabilities, misconfigured systems, and unauthorized changes that may introduce security risks.

PRIORITIZATION

Analyze the discovered vulnerabilities and threats to rank them based on their severity and potential impact on the organization. Use this prioritization to mitigate risks that could have the most detrimental consequences if exploited.

VALIDATION

Regularly audit your cybersecurity defenses to validate their effectiveness. When possible, audit your response plan to protect the organization from the unfortunate possibility of an exploited vulnerability or exposure.

MOBILIZATION

Act on the insights gained from the previous steps to reinforce your organization’s defenses. This includes patching vulnerabilities, enhancing security protocols, and effectively training staff to respond to potential threats. Ensure that all actions are coordinated and that stakeholders are informed of changes and updates in security policies.

Challenges In Implementing CTEM

CTEM Requires Automation:

The CTEM ecosystem represents siloed technologies that lack context and still require significant manual analysis by threat analysts and threat intelligence teams to extract holistic views and actionable insight.

Missing Contextualized Data Models:

Data from disparate security tools return data in various formats and lack context. An intelligence layer is required to contextualize information returned from data sources to gain meaningful and analytical insights to reduce risk exposure.

Requires SME or Integrated Intelligence:

As your team identifies exposures, it may become challenging to prioritize your findings. Technologies that enable CTEM programs provide an additional layer of threat intelligence by monitoring vulnerability and threat sources to assist in prioritizing exposures.

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Learn more about how the Interpres Threat Exposure Management Platform can help your organization build a Continuous Threat Exposure Management program.

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