What is Threat Exposure Management (TEM)?

Threat exposure management is an integrated security methodology that helps in a proactive state of detecting and mitigating threats. Weaving together threat intelligence, attack surface management, and vulnerability assessment into a single system enables organizations to discover, prioritize, and remediate security exposure before it can be exploited.

In this blog, we will discuss the different elements of threat exposure management, how to implement it, common challenges, best practices, and how to measure success. We will also learn how threat exposure management evolves for cloud and hybrid environments, and how SentinelOne enables this mission-critical security function.

What is Threat Exposure Management?

Threat Exposure Management (TEM) is a structured security approach that combines threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and attack surface monitoring to identify, assess, and prioritize potential security exposures based on actual risk to the organization. Unlike traditional security methods that focus mainly on vulnerability identification, TEM takes a broader view by considering the entire threat landscape and how specific vulnerabilities might be exploited in your unique environment.

Traditional vulnerability management typically follows a cyclical pattern of scan, identify, patch, and repeat. This approach often results in overwhelming vulnerability reports with limited context about which issues pose actual risks to the organization.  Threat Exposure Management enhances vulnerability management by incorporating threat intelligence and attack surface analysis to determine which vulnerabilities attackers are actively targeting and which assets are most exposed.

Key Components of Threat Exposure Management

Threat exposure management includes interrelated functions and processes designed to detect, evaluate, and remediate security exposures.

Threat intelligence integration

Threat intelligence integration is the process of gathering, analyzing, and using the information organizations have about existing and potential breaches and attacks. This element integrates the threat indicators of the outside world with the security data within the company so that teams will have a more holistic view of the entire threat landscape. Integrating threat intelligence effectively means filtering out what is and is not relevant so that teams can focus on the things that pose a risk to the specific environment and business operations.

Attack surface discovery and mapping

Attack surface discovery means identifying all possible points of entry that an attacker can use to access the systems and data. This will entail taking an inventory of everything, which means listing all devices, applications, cloud resources, accounts, etc., and understanding how they are configured and how they connect to each other. Modern environments evolve quickly, so this discovery process must be continuous, not one-time.

Threat modeling and simulation

Threat modeling gives a systematic approach to identify and assess threats to the systems and data based on design and architecture. It consists of looking at the systems through the eyes of an attacker and determining security holes and possible paths of attack. Threat modeling is useful for every application, system, network, or complete business process.

Vulnerability context and impact assessment

Instead of just spotting security weaknesses, vulnerability context digs deeper and assesses the real-world implications of such flaws in the environment. This involves assessing if a vulnerability can actually be exploited, which systems and platforms are affected, and what data and functionality those systems maintain or control.

Risk-based prioritization

The risk-based prioritization feature of the tool prioritizes the exposure that needs to be fixed based on the data collected through all other components of the total enterprise manager. This prioritization takes into consideration things like the severity of the vulnerability, the value of the affected assets, active threats, existing mitigating controls, and the effort needed to remediate.

Benefits of Effective Threat Exposure Management

Implementing a comprehensive threat exposure management program delivers multiple benefits that improve both security outcomes and operational efficiency.

Preemptive threat mitigation

With threat exposure management, organizations can find and fix security gaps before attackers discover them. Using threat intelligence with vulnerability data helps security teams understand which vulnerabilities are actually at the highest risk and prioritize remediation efforts accordingly. This early intervention approach prevents the standard cycle of reactive security measures, where teams rush to remediate systems after attacks have begun.

Optimized security resource allocation

Human resources, time, and a limited budget are the common ground for 90% of the security teams of the organizations. Threat exposure management provides a solution and guidance, focusing on what few security issues matter most. Teams can focus on those vulnerabilities that pose real risks to real assets instead of attempting to remediate them all.

Accelerated mean time to remediate

Traditional vulnerability management can create backlogs of unaddressed vulnerabilities as teams try to prioritize their workloads. This is where threat exposure management comes in to speed up remediation by telling teams exactly which vulnerabilities take priority. A much more targeted approach that allows teams to work through remediation tasks quickly and decreases the opportunity window for an attacker.

Enhanced security posture visibility

Threat exposure management helps to gain complete visibility into the security posture of an organization. Rather than siloed views of vulnerabilities, threats, or assets, TEM forms a single image of the performance of these components in relation to one another. Adopting this holistic perspective allows security leaders to know their true security posture and see changes over time.

Improved executive communication

Threat exposure management is best known for its power to provide actionable business-relevant context around technical security data. Executives better understand the value of security when the security teams are able to demonstrate how the most critical business functions of the organization are at risk from specific threats and how security activities enable reduced risk from those threats.

How to Build a Threat Exposure Management Strategy

Implementing a successful threat exposure management strategy will take considerable thought and orchestration across various security functions.

Clear goals

Identifying clear, specific goals that are aligned with the overall security and business goals of the organization is the first step. Such accomplishments could mean faster time to remediate critical vulnerabilities, improved visibility across cloud environments, or more effective prioritization of security efforts based on true risk.

Assessing current capabilities

Analyze the existing tools, processes, and skills used for vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and asset discovery. Work out what the teams need to fill in as gaps to help organizations reach their TEM objectives.

Technology selection

Concentrate on those tools that facilitate important TEM activities. For example, vulnerability scanners, threat intelligence platforms, attack surface management tools, risk scoring, and integrations. Choose complementary technologies that serve the organization’s needs.

Process development

Organizations should define workflows, decision criteria, escalation paths, and reporting requirements. Document these processes with clarity and train everyone involved to ensure consistency.

Steps to Identify and Prioritize Threat Exposures

Asset discovery and classification are the foundation for identifying and prioritizing threat exposures. This methodology inventories every asset in the environment and its role in business, the type of data stored, and the business function. All subsequent prioritization decisions are built on accurate asset information.

Post asset discovery, perform an exhaustive vulnerability scan with multiple vectors. Complement traditional vulnerability scanners with penetration testing, code analysis, and configuration assessments to find weaknesses that automated scanners may miss, in order to build a complete inventory of possible vulnerabilities throughout the environment.

The next step is to augment the vulnerability data with context. This includes knowing which vulnerabilities are exploitable within the environment, which have a public exploit that anyone can use, and which are actively being exploited in the wild by threat actors. This processing turns raw vulnerability data into usable security intelligence.

The next step is risk scoring. Each exposure is assigned a risk score based on the criticality of the vulnerability, the importance of the asset on which the vulnerability is, threat intelligence on the exploitability of the vulnerability, and the effectiveness of existing security controls. They will rank exposures by the real risk they pose to the organization and not just the technical severity (e.g., CVSS).

Define risk scores from high to low and set associated remediation thresholds so high-risk exposures get prioritized first, while lower-risk issues fall into a defined time frame of remediation. Document the justification of these thresholds to allow for consistent decisions and to answer any inquiries from the stakeholders regarding prioritization decisions.

Metrics and KPIs to Measure Threat Exposure Management

A mix of operational and outcome metrics is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of threat exposure management. Exposure coverage metrics are the measurement of the percentage of the environment covered by the TEM program. This covers the proportion of assets found, categorized, and scanned on a routine basis. Blind spots where unknown exposures may exist are captured by low coverage.

Time-based metrics capture the speed of identifying and remediating exposures. Key metrics include MTTD (mean time to detect), which identifies how quickly new vulnerabilities are found, MTTR (Mean Time to Remediate), and the average time for resolution from when an IT admin learns of the vulnerability to when it is fixed. Reducing these times is a good sign of operational efficiency.

Risk reduction metrics are a measure of TEM activities on the overall organizational security posture. Some of these metrics could be things like the total number of high-risk exposures, average risk score across all assets, or the percentage of critical assets with zero high-risk exposures.

These metrics are used to evaluate the performance of the threat exposure management program in optimizing the abundant resources available to it. Examples would be how many remediated exposures are tracked per staff hour, what percentage of the issues were automatically remediated, or the amount of time spent on high-risk vs low-risk exposures. These have a role to play in finding process improvements and opportunities for automation.

Common Threat Exposure Management Challenges

Common challenges among organizations implementing threat exposure management can limit the effectiveness of their program.

Threat intelligence overload

The massive amount of diverse threat intelligence available is often too overwhelming for organizations to effectively manage. Every day, the security teams are flooded with thousands of threat indicators, and it becomes a challenge to figure out which ones are relevant to their environment. An excess of alerts can result in the detection of serious threats being missed or the investigation of false positives taking up too much time.

Limited visibility across environments

With the world becoming more complex and organizations moving to distributed environments, they find it difficult to maintain 100% visibility. The cloud, shadow IT, remote work endpoints, and IoT devices create blind spots where exposures can fester.

Resource and expertise constraints

TEM demands expertise in threat modeling, vulnerability scanning, and risk posture management. This skill gap creates a shortage of qualified security professionals within many organizations, which inhibits effective TEM programs from being implemented.

Technology integration issues

TEM can be an assembly of different technologies that need glue to work together. Most organizations have disjointed tools that leads to data silos, manual processes and results that lack consistency. That fragmentation leads to inefficiency and gaps in the security net.

Operational friction

The implementation of the TEM program often causes conflict between security teams and other operational groups. Meanwhile, security team pressures on remediation are high, and IT operations must find the balance between security,  availability, and performance capabilities.

Threat Exposure Management Best Practices

Programs that do well in threat exposure management use best practices that not only extract the most security value out of the process but also reduce operational friction.

Implement continuous discovery processes

To successfully achieve continuous discovery, organizations need a combination of discovery methods such as network scanning, agent-based monitoring, API integrations, and log analysis. These approaches must reach across all elements of an environment, from an on-premises infrastructure to cloud services to endpoint devices.

Contextualize threats to your environment

Security teams will need to translate external threat intelligence to assets and vulnerabilities seen in-house. This requires a detailed environment map, including network segmentation, access controls, and asset dependencies. To anticipate which threats are more likely than others to impact an organization, threat context should provide background on the motivation and capabilities that attackers tend to have, and on the types of targets they usually pick.

Adopt risk-based prioritization

Prioritization is effective when it borrows from various aspects of the ecosystem, including the severity of vulnerability, criticality of the asset, threat intelligence, exploitability, and existing controls. All these factors drive a composite score, which informs the remediation strategy. This scoring should be calculated in a consistent manner to maintain comparability across different exposure types.

Integrate across security functions

The first step of integration occurs through technology integrations that allow security tools to freely share data and correlate as needed. Vulnerability scanners should integrate into SIEM solutions, which should lead to threat intelligence platforms and security orchestration tools. Such connections create automated workflows that are able to guide data from detection to analysis to remediation without any additional human interaction.

Measure and report effectiveness

Enterprise must maintain a comprehensive metrics portfolio for TEM, everything from asset discovery coverage to remediation times to risk score trends. These metrics must be monitored over time to observe any improvements or decline in security performance. These metrics should be reviewed frequently in order to see potential issues and improvement opportunities within processes.

Threat Exposure Management in Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Threat Exposure Management has unique challenges in Cloud and hybrid environments. Cloud security Posture management (CSPM) is one of the most important areas of TEM. CSPM tools monitor cloud configurations for security best practices and compliance requirements, identifying misconfigurations that could expose sensitive data, change resource behavior, and/or lead to a data breach. These tools communicate with cloud platforms via different APIs and continuously monitor cloud resources and configurations.

The importance of identity and access management is particularly heightened in cloud environments where network boundaries provide only limited protection. For cloud, a TEM should discover and assess identity configurations, privileged accounts, and access policies. It requires a focus on over-privileged accounts and available paths where cross-cloud authentication can be used as an attack vector.

Another foundational pillar of cloud TEM is container security. These types of exposures are new in container environments, ranging from vulnerable base images to insecure orchestration configurations. Hence, TEM programs must have container-specific discovery and assessment capabilities that accommodate these risks.

How SentinelOne Enables Threat Exposure Management

The core capabilities of SentinelOne’s security solution enable effective threat exposure management. The platform provides integrated endpoint protection, cloud security, and threat intelligence for consolidated visibility and control across various environments.

SentinelOne is a Singularity Platform that provides next-gen endpoint security with real-time detection and response capabilities. The system agents in the platform continuously monitor the endpoints, detecting not just known vulnerabilities but also behaviors that might suggest unknown threats.

SentinelOne enhances exposure prioritization with Threat Intelligence capabilities that tell where threat actors are actively targeting the assets. Its platform consolidates information from a variety of sources, such as the company’s global sensor network, its threat research team, and third-party intelligence feeds.

SentinelOne has a unified management console that facilitates transparency across the security terrain. Companies can leverage the console to see vulnerability data, threat intel, and detection events in one view, as well as how those factors relate to one another.

Conclusion

Threat Exposure Management is a pragmatic bridge from reactive security to proactive security risk management. TEM aggregates complete asset discovery, contextual vulnerability assessment, and threat intelligence together so security teams can solve for the exposures that matter with limited resources. Concentrating only on what needs to be protected enhances security results while ensuring a more efficient use of resources.

TEM is achieved through a mix of the correct tech, processes, and expertise. Organizations will need to develop continuous discovery capabilities, integrate threat intelligence, and set up risk-based prioritization frameworks. They also need to promote collaboration between security, IT operations, and business stakeholders to ensure that security aligns with the business context. The need for threat exposure management will continue to rise along with the complexity of the digital environments in which we operate and the sophistication of the threat actors targeting them.