What Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)? | Cobalt

Continuous threat exposure management protects your organization’s digital environment by giving you the ability to keep your defenses current and intercept vulnerabilities in real-time. In an ever-changing technology landscape where new threats are constantly emerging, CTEM forms a critical line of defense against cyberattacks. Here’s a guide to the essentials of what CTEM is, why it’s important, how it works, and how to implement it effectively.

CTEM Defined

Continuous threat exposure management is a proactive digital security process that deploys real-time monitoring for ongoing identification, validation, prioritization, and neutralization of threats. The process aims to defend digital environments by integrating asset visibility, risk scoring, validation testing, analytics tools, and workflow orchestration with other security tools. It covers your entire attack surface, including IT, cloud, operational technology (OT), Internet of Things (IoT), and identity system vulnerabilities. CTEM helps meet today’s need for rapid response to emerging threats in real-time.

CTEM vs. Vulnerability Management 

CTEM differs from traditional vulnerability management (VM) in its purpose, scope, strategy, and methods. 

• Traditional VM reacts to threats through periodic scans, whereas CTEM focuses more broadly on decreasing an organization’s exposure to risk. CTEM aims to intercept threats proactively through continuous monitoring integrated with adversarial validation, business-context prioritization, and operational mobilization. 
• While VM primarily focuses on software vulnerabilities, CTEM covers your complete digital attack surface. VM takes a siloed approach to addressing vulnerabilities, while CTEM takes a holistic approach. 

Consider this "unlocked door" analogy to understand the difference. Visualize a house: The vulnerability is apt to a broken lock on your front door. The lock mechanism is defective and can be easily picked. In this analogy, the exposure would be the fact that the house is situated on a busy street, and the front door is visible to everyone passing by.

Finally, VM primarily uses automated scanning tools to detect known vulnerabilities. CTEM incorporates scanning into an arsenal that includes tools for functions such as attack surface management (ASM), threat intelligence, analytics, and breach and attack simulation (BAS).

Why CTEM Matters Today

CTEM plays an essential role in managing today’s dynamic security environment. Continuous attack surface management has become critical because today’s security vulnerabilities represent real-time risks that extend beyond on-premise IT. 

Rapid mobile, cloud, and IoT adoption has accelerated the need for a comprehensive, continuous approach to threat management. Coupled with AI-powered cyberattacks, these trends have opened wider exploit windows that require more rapid responses to keep threats contained. 

Organizations need to move beyond just finding vulnerabilities and add context, threat level, and other intel to know where to focus our time, energy, and effort of our dev and security teams.

CTEM Benefits for Security Teams

CTEM offers significant benefits to security teams and their organizations. Comprehensive, continuous attack surface monitoring translates into fewer blind spots and reduced risks. Alignment of CTEM strategies with real-world threat behavior and meaningful business priorities saves time wasted managing false positives. Real-time responses accelerate remediation cycles, making teams more productive and denying attackers opportunities to exploit vulnerability windows.

How CTEM Works: The Five Stages

CTEM uses a five-step process to diagnose risks and take mitigation action:

1. Scoping: The initial phase of the process limits the scope of the CTEM program by defining the assets, infrastructure, and attack surfaces to be protected in the context of their business role and value and your organization’s security priorities.
2. Discovery: The discovery phase implements continuous monitoring of attack surfaces, vulnerabilities, and potential attack paths.
3. Prioritization: The next stage of the CTEM process prioritizes vulnerabilities based on threat intelligence, exploitability, and business context.
4. Validation: CTEM validation uses methods such as pentesting and red teaming to confirm which vulnerabilities represent real-world threats and recommend remediations.
5. Mobilization: The final phase of the CTEM process takes action against identified threats through steps such as triggering alerts, orchestrating mitigation and remediation workflows, and providing reports to cybersecurity managers and organizational stakeholders.

The scoping, discovery, and prioritization stages involve diagnosing risk, while the validation and mobilization stages take action on diagnostic intelligence.

Key Components of a CTEM Program

CTEM programs integrate a number of essential components. These include:

• Asset Visibility: CTEM depends on comprehensive mapping of attack surfaces and assets to identify what’s at risk and what vulnerabilities leave valuable targets exposed.
• Risk Scoring: CTEM measures risk and prioritizes vulnerabilities based on combined criteria that encompass factors such as severity, exploitability, and business impact.
• Validation Testing: CTEM takes a practical approach to threat management by evaluating whether an attacker could actually exploit a weakness and whether current defenses are sufficient to neutralize threats.
• Analytics: CTEM risk and validation assessments employ analytics to quantify variables such as assets, attack surfaces, threat levels, business impact, and security performance.
• Workflow Orchestration: CTEM uses workflow orchestration tools to coordinate security tools with other tools needed for effective threat response, such as alert notification, ticket management, and project management tools.

These CTEM components function in the context of other supporting methodologies and tools. For instance, a Penetration Testing as a service (PTaaS) platform supports CTEM validation testing by helping teams verify the exploitability of vulnerabilities.

CTEM Tools and Technology Landscape

CTEM solutions encompass a few major categories of essential tools. These new Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs) can include:

• Attack Surface Management (ASM) Tools: ASM solutions integrate attack surface discovery, mapping, scanning, analysis, management, and reporting.
• Vulnerability Management (VM) Platforms: VM platforms automatically scan attack surfaces to detect and analyze vulnerabilities.
• Continuous Validation and Adversarial Testing: Tools such as Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) test the exploitability of vulnerabilities and adequacy of defenses by simulating attacks on attack surfaces. Continuous pentesting provides another layer of validation for production code and applications. 
• Workflow Automation: Solutions such as security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms accelerate incident response time by using alerts to trigger automated workflows.

Security teams leverage these tools by deploying them in coordination with methodologies and resources such as pentesting frameworks and threat intelligence knowledge bases.

CTEM in Practice: Real-World Use Cases

In application, CTEM serves a variety of practical purposes for organizations. Common use cases include:

• Validating high-value findings that signify exploitable security vulnerabilities and represent real business threats
• Exposing cloud misconfigurations that can leave remotely stored files accessible to intruders
• Testing external attack surfaces to discover hidden weaknesses in assets such as web applications, LLM models, and APIs
• Prioritizing patching to help security teams better utilize time and resources

This versatile range of use cases makes CTEM a valuable process for security teams.

Common Challenges When Implementing CTEM

Organizations and security teams may face a number of obstacles hindering the implementation of a CTEM program. Some of the most frequent issues include:

• Limited Asset Inventory: Uncataloged assets, such as dormant accounts or obsolete files, can leave blind spots in attack surface management.
• Siloed Tooling: Lack of communication between security tools and related apps can limit vulnerability insights as well as orchestration of mitigation actions.
• Validation Resource Constraints: Constraints on time, budget, talent, or tools can restrain the range of CTEM scope and results.
• Slow Remediation Processes: Delays in implementing remediation recommendations can run counter to the need for speedy validation, increasing criticality in today’s secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC).

Fortunately, these challenges have ready solutions. For example, a combination of automated tools and manual techniques can help uncover hidden assets, while workflow orchestration solutions can integrate siloed tools, and PTaaS services can alleviate resource constraints and accelerate remediation. Still, security teams embarking on CTEM programs should anticipate potential problems and make pre-emptive plans to address them.

How Offensive Security Supports CTEM

CTEM is often deployed with offensive security services that provide validation testing. Continuous penetration testing, attack surface monitoring, and DAST scans all assist with vulnerability discovery, evaluation, and mitigation. 

Furthermore, penetration testing simulates attacks to verify the exploitability of vulnerabilities discovered through ASM scans, while providing remediation recommendations to help teams put findings into action. Together, these offensive security methodologies help execute the validation testing phase of CTEM programs.

Getting Started with CTEM

How do you get started with CTEM? Here’s a simple roadmap to follow:

1. Define Your Scope: Review the business needs that inform your CTEM strategy and begin cataloging your digital assets and attack surfaces.
2. Integrate Visibility Tools: Connect relevant tools such as solutions for ASM mapping, vulnerability scanning, threat intelligence, analytics, and security information and event management (SIEM).
3. Implement Prioritization Logic: Design and deploy a scoring system to evaluate vulnerabilities as security and business risks.
4. Validate Critical Exposures: Incorporate offensive security testing into your CTEM activity.
5. Refine Your CTEM Program Over Time: Set CTEM program goals based on measurable key performance indicators, track and review metrics, and make corrective adjustments to continuously improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your program.

An experienced offensive security provider can assist you with implementing these steps. Reach out to Cobalt and let our team of penetration testing experts help your security team implement different aspects of this emerging security process.