What is CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management)?

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a framework that continuously monitors an organization’s attack surface to identify and mitigate cyber threats in real-time. It lets you prioritize risks and automate remediation to reduce your exposure to threats and protect your systems and data.

You have been using many tools and third-party integrations to sustain your on-premise and remote workforce, which increases your attack surface and exposes your IT environment to cybersecurity threats. Weaknesses in your systems make it easier for attackers to easily exploit your supply chain and launch advanced attacks.

With CTEM, you get a chance to identify threats in real-time and secure your assets. It uses threat intelligence to prioritize risks based on business impact and exploitability, and helps reduce incident response times and alert fatigue. It also helps you meet compliance requirements and avoid fines and legal consequences.

In this article, we’ll discuss what CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management) is, its core components, how it works, benefits, challenges, best practices, and how to select the right CTEM tool to monitor and eliminate cyber threats before they do any harm.

What is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is an automated cybersecurity management technique that helps organizations identify security vulnerabilities and gaps, remediate them to reduce threat exposure, and protect their systems and data. It happens by continuously assessing your attack surfaces, testing defenses, and addressing vulnerabilities in real-time.

CTEM assesses an organization’s complete ecosystem that includes networks, assets, devices, systems, etc., to identify weaknesses that attackers can exploit. It scans an organization’s IT systems for security loopholes, configuration errors, missed updates and patches, etc. This helps security teams address threats immediately before cyber criminals can exploit them, to be able to improve cyber resilience.

Why is CTEM Important?

Traditional cybersecurity tools and frameworks are not enough to fight advanced cyberattacks. Attackers look for security weaknesses in your systems and third-party tools or exploit poor security management to threaten your organization. They also exploit supply chain vulnerabilities, unused user accounts, weak passwords, and human errors to infiltrate your system.

The scary thing is traditional tools often fail to detect them, resulting in unauthorized access, data breaches, and other attacks. This is the reason you need a proactive security strategy instead of a reactive one to stay secure. CTEM provides ongoing security monitoring to identify, analyze, and mitigate cyber threats before they harm your systems and steal data.

What CTEM offers:

• Reduces risk exposure: CTEM continuously assesses your organization’s attack surface, identifies security weaknesses and prioritizes cyber threats. This helps you close security gaps before they become a severe risk.

• Improves visibility: Modern organizations operate in on-premises, hybrid, and cloud infrastructure and also support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) work culture. CTEM continuously scans your digital assets, whether outside or inside, to help security teams find vulnerabilities and take proactive actions.

• Prepare for threats: CTEM provides security with threat intelligence and automated threat remediation in real-time to counteract new attack techniques effectively.

• Compliance: Organizations need to demonstrate their compliance with industry standards to prevent themselves from legal consequences and fines. CTEM continuously monitors and logs security events to help you maintain compliance.

Core Components of CTEM

CTEM provides an ongoing and proactive approach to identifying and eliminating security risks. To implement it in your organization, you need to understand some key components of CTEM and how it helps you maintain a powerful security posture.

• Asset discovery and management: Continuous threat and exposure management tracks your digital assets, such as servers, cloud environments, endpoints, and third-party integrations and updates asset inventories. This way, it detects unprotected devices and provides visibility across multiple environments to manage your assets and protect them from cyberattacks.
• Risk assessment: CTEM uses automated security scanners to monitor threats and conducts vulnerability assessments to continuously find security risks. It assesses outdated software, access controls, and misconfigurations to let you adapt and address vulnerabilities in real-time.

• Attack path analysis: Attack path analysis helps you understand how a cybercriminal entered, what they accessed, and what data they stole. It simulates attack scenarios to reveal security gaps, identify high-risk pathways to apply patches, and strengthens access control mechanisms and other defenses.

• Security testing and validation: You can conduct regular penetration testing to examine defense capabilities and perform security posture assessments to evaluate improvements. Conduct attack simulation exercises to test the effectiveness of your incident response plan.

• Automated remediation: CTEM’s automated remediation and response system allows you to patch vulnerabilities automatically, deploy AI-powered security automation, and reduce the handling time of routine incident response tasks.

• Threat intelligence: CTEM utilizes threat intelligence capabilities to stay one step ahead of attackers. It includes analyzing adversary tactics, procedures, and techniques and using AI-driven predictive analysis to identify and remediate attack vectors.

How Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Works?

CTEM is a structured process that works on a loop to provide visibility into your organization’s attack surface. It allows your security teams to identify, prioritize, validate, and eliminate risks in real-time and repeat the process to continue securing your data and systems from attackers.

CTEM operates in five stages – scope, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization. Let’s discuss how Continuous Threat Exposure Management Framework works across these stages to eliminate threats and improve security posture.

Step 1: Scope

The first process of CTEM is to define the scope of threats and attacks you may face and create an action plan. Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to assess the risk level on your organization’s attack surface.

For this, you need to follow these steps:

• Identify essential assets: Security teams need to identify internal and external assets, such as databases, applications, cloud infrastructure, and endpoints.

• Define attack vectors: Security teams must analyze the most relevant and dangerous cyber threats and the tactics they use to enter your organization. If you understand the attack pathways, it will be easy for you to define the scope.

• Establish security goals: Your security efforts must align with the standard security requirements and risk tolerance levels to pass the audit process. For this, privacy and security professionals must define security goals to meet industry standards.

• Set assessment boundaries: You can define which parts of your IT ecosystem will be included in the scope to let security teams focus on those assets only. Consider prioritizing high-value assets and essential business operations to protect them from cyber threats.

With a clear and precise scope, you can ensure your CTEM efforts are effective, aligned, and targeted with your business security goals.

Step 2: Discovery

Once the scope is ready, security teams perform an in-house discovery process to list all assets, identify vulnerabilities, detect security gaps, and understand the risks. The CTEM framework helps organizations discover weaknesses and misconfigurations using certain tools.

For discovery, you must:

• Map asset inventory: Create a list of assets, whether internal or external, including applications, IoT devices, third-party integrations, networks, and endpoints. This will help you learn which assets might be subject to exploitation.

• Assess vulnerabilities: CTEM automatically scans your assets to identify vulnerabilities and security gaps. This will allow the security team to list out outdated software, weak security controls, and misconfigurations.

• Integrate threat intelligence: CTEM integrates with threat intelligence to detect and analyze emerging attack methods that may harm your reputation and cause hefty fines.

• Identify unmanaged and shadow IT assets: Security teams must discover unauthorized software that could help cybercriminals enter your systems.

The discovery step of CTEM helps organizations gain a clear understanding of attack vectors and act before they exploit your system weaknesses.

Step 3: Prioritization

In this stage, security teams prioritize the discovered security risks based on their risk level. The cyber threat exposure management program assigns the issues a priority rating based on exploitability and impacts of the threats.

This step allows you to:

• Check risk-based vulnerability score: CTEM allows you to assign priority levels to your discovered security issues using different frameworks and risk models.

• Evaluate business context: CTEM lets you understand how the discovered vulnerabilities impact your business operations and data security.

• Correlate threat intelligence: The security team analyzes whether the vulnerability can be exploited to hinder your essential business operations. It helps you decide which vulnerability to address first.

• Filter out low risk: CTEM enables the security team to monitor and analyze all necessary assets within your networks to filter out low-impact threats that don’t pose significant threats to your systems.

By prioritizing risks, the security teams can allocate resources based on priority and address the most dangerous risks to prevent security breaches at the right time.

Step 4: Validation

In this stage, security teams validate the effectiveness of their existing security controls against known threats. The cyber threat exposure management program uses its service capabilities, such as attack simulation and automated penetration tools, to assess the previously discovered exposures, estimate the attack’s impact, and test your response plan.

To validate your controls, perform:

• Penetration testing and attack simulations: Hackers aim to exploit your system’s vulnerabilities and gain unauthorized access. Security teams must perform penetration testing and simulate attack scenarios to understand how attackers gain access to your systems.

• Adversary emulation: Security teams replicate the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of cybercriminals to create real-life scenarios to test an organization’s security controls.

• Assess security strategy: Test whether your current strategy is enough to detect and eliminate risks. If not, it’s time to refine it.

• Assessing business impact: Find out how a threat impacts your business in terms of finances, reputation, data loss, compliance, and more, and compare it against your risk appetite.

With CTEM, you can validate your security controls and instruct your security teams to shift their focus to high-risk attacks that pose immediate danger.

Step 5: Mobilization

This is the final stage of CTEM that allows organizations to take steps to remediate security risks. Here, security teams team up with developers and product owners to remediate threats and vulnerabilities. They apply fixes, deploy patches, update systems and applications, configure settings, enforce security strategies, and more.

Key steps of the mobilization process include:

• Change in configurations and apply patches: Security teams apply updates, patches, and important security measures to fix vulnerabilities.

• Improving security controls: You must improve your current security controls, use automated security tools to save time, and instruct everyone in the organization to follow strict security policies to prevent unauthorized access and the chances of risks.

• Security awareness: Spread security awareness among employees about cyber threats, how to stay secure from them, and best security practices to follow.

• Continuous monitoring: Organizations must continuously monitor for new cyber threats and modify strategies accordingly.

CTEM works in a loop; once you complete all the stages, you don’t have to stop there. Continue repeating the processes to keep discovering threats and vulnerabilities, prioritizing them, remediating them, and staying secure from attackers.

Benefits of Continuous Threat Exposure Management

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) identifies, assesses, and eliminates security risks and helps organizations avoid emerging cyber threats.

Below are some benefits of CTEM:

• Threat management: Traditional security frameworks focus on responding to threats after they occur. But the CTEM framework enables organizations to identify vulnerabilities before an attack, monitor threat exposure across the attack surface, and use attack simulations to improve defenses. This will help the organization reduce the risk of ransomware infections, data breaches, and zero-day attacks.

• Complete risk visibility: Most organizations fail to find the blind spots in their security posture due to misconfiguration, third-party risks, and shadow IT. CTEM continuously monitors and discovers all digital assets to check whether security is good enough to tackle upcoming risks. It also verifies if exposed or unprotected assets are secured before attackers exploit them, and the security team has a real-time view of the attack surface.

• Threat prioritization: Organizations receive plenty of security alerts daily, most of them are false positives or negatives. If you focus on addressing each one of them, it will consume plenty of time and your resources. CTEM uses risk-based prioritization to segment the most essential vulnerabilities and low-priority threats. It also uses AI-based analytics to rank the risks based on exploitability, business context, and impact. This will give you a clear understanding of which security gaps need to be fixed first.

• Reduced attack surface: CTEM identifies and closes misconfigured settings in multiple environments to minimize your organization’s exposure to cyber threats. It helps you find and remove outdated software and unused accounts, and implements the least privileged access to limit unauthorized access.

• Faster response: CTEM enables real-time monitoring and integrates with threat intelligence feeds to detect discovered vulnerabilities, adapt to attack techniques, and reduce response time to cyber threats. This will help you address new attacks before they become serious issues for your organization.

Challenges in Implementing CTEM

Although CTEM provides a structured and proactive approach to help your organization stay ahead of cyber threats, organizations face challenges when implementing it. Various factors trigger these challenges and might stop you from successfully implementing the CTEM program.

• Complexity in monitoring and assessment: CTEM requires continuous assessment of risks across your entire assets. It will be a challenge for security teams to manage an extensive attack surface with too many systems and endpoints, remote culture, BYOD policy, etc. Many companies still operate in siloed security environments, which makes it difficult for them to get a single view of all cyber risks.

Solution: Organizations can use automated security tools to manage their attack surfaces and monitor vulnerabilities automatically. They can also deploy AI-based analytics to correlate cyber risks and get insights.

• Data overload: CTEM continuously monitors threat exposure and generates various security alerts and logs. Security teams struggle with such vast data, which often leads to missing essential threats.

Solution: You can use ML-based threat intelligence to categorize high-level and low-level threats. Implement risk-based prioritization to focus on high exploitability threats more to save time and resources.

• Lack of skills: CTEM is not a technology, it is a program that needs threat intelligence, a continuous risk management process, penetration testing, and cybersecurity expertise to work. However, professionals with low skill levels find it difficult to implement it and manage threat exposure.

Solution: You can invest in cybersecurity training programs to improve your security team’s skills in CTEM. Work on improving attack path analysis, security validation, and red teaming. Also, you can invest in AI-based security automation software to reduce manual workload.

• Cost and resource constraint: While implementing CTEM, small and medium-sized businesses find it difficult to justify the costs of security tools, skilled personnel, cloud-native technologies, and automation. The smaller organizations often don’t have the resources to validate continuous security checking, such as red teaming and attack simulations.

Solution: You can utilize open-source security tools to lower your costs and start with a phased CTEM adoption to focus on essential assets first. You can also outsource CTEM functions to Managed Detection and Response (MDR) providers, such as SentinelOne Vigilance.

• Compliance issues: CTEM continuously monitors all your assets and collects data on networks, users, and devices to analyze them. This could raise privacy concerns and compliance risks with industry standards, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA.

Solution: The first thing you need to do is to audit the CTEM processes regularly to check whether the process complies with regulations. Find compliance gaps and close them. You can use data anonymization and encryption to protect confidential information and user data.

Best Practices for Effective CTEM Implementation

When you implement CTEM effectively to improve security posture, you will require a risk-based, automated, and strategic approach. Organizations need to check whether they get real-time threat intelligence, continuous security assessment, and proactive remediation while integrating CTEM into their existing security framework.

Let’s discuss the best practices to maximize the effectiveness of CTEM implementations:

• Define a clear roadmap: Define CTEM objectives clearly that align with your current security goals, including reducing the attack surface, improving threat detection, and maintaining compliance. Set measurable KPIs and prioritize important assets in CTEM strategies.

• Discover and map the attack surface: Use Attack Surface Management (ASM) tools to identify and protect all your assets within a network. Discover and eliminate abandoned cloud services, shadow IT, etc., and ensure security controls cover all your essential systems.

• Implement risk prioritization: Establish risk-based prioritization rules to prioritize highly vulnerable assets to analyze and prevent cyber attacks. Use AI-based analytics to find a connection between vulnerabilities and attack patterns.

• Automate security validation: Implement attack simulation tools to validate defensive controls. Conduct red team exercises to conduct penetration tests and simulate attacks to identify weak points. You can also use purple teaming to improve collaboration between the blue team (defensive) and the red team (offensive).

• Establish a remediation workflow: Automate configuration hardening and patch deployment for high-level vulnerabilities. Implement zero trust architecture and improve incident response plans to remediate threats faster.

• Monitor external security: Assess external security risks continuously and manage third-party vendor risks with cyber threat and exposure management. Use analysis tools to detect risks in third-party code and implement zero-trust controls to give limited access to sensitive data.

How to Choose the Right CTEM Tool?

Organizations must select the right CTEM tool to manage cyber threats. The right solution offers continuous risk assessment, attack surface visibility, automated security validation, and seamless integration.

You can select the tools based on these key factors:

• Identify organization’s requirements: Security needs of organizations vary based on their attack surface, vulnerabilities, and risk they often face, and other unique business challenges. Set a security goal and decide what controls would best solve your challenges. For example, decide whether you need asset discovery, exposure monitoring, automated risk assessment, risk prioritization, etc. Shortlist multiple CTEM tools that meet your security requirements.

• Track down the features: With the list of CTEM tools you have, you can explore their features and verify whether they support continuous attack surface visibility, continuous monitoring, threat intelligence integration, scalability, responsive customer support, user-friendly interface, and reporting. Always examine the platform’s reputation and industry experience while making your decision.

• Check automation and AI-based remediation: Security teams often lack the resources and time to manage a high volume of security data at a time. A good CTEM tool automates remediation suggestions and provides AI-based security adaptation.

• Integration with existing security tools: The right CTEM tool works alongside your existing security tool. Make sure the tool can integrate well with XDR, SIEM, and vulnerability management tools. To automate the risk remediation process, the CTEM tool must integrate with ITSM platforms as well.

• Evaluate compliance requirements: A reliable CTEM tool must support various regulatory requirements and provide continuous monitoring and audit-ready reporting. It must provide features, such as automated compliance assessments, real-time compliance dashboards, audit logs and forensic analysis, and pre-configured security policies.

SentinelOne for CTEM

SentinelOne offers advanced tools and technologies to reduce your organization’s exposure to cyberthreats and protect against attacks. It identifies, prioritizes, and addresses threats to protect your data and systems. Irrespective of how complex and diverse your IT infrastructure is, the platform has solutions to meet all your security and privacy needs.

SentinelOne’s Singularity Threat Intelligence capability allows you to get deeper knowledge of your attack surface. It uses insights from 1800+ breach responses yearly and 200k hours of incident responses a year. It also has 500 threat intelligence experts spread across 30 countries. It monitors your systems, applications, and networks to find adversaries and respond to them proactively. Apart from this, SentinelOne offers other useful tools, such as Singularity Vulnerability Management and XDR to detect and remove threats.

Take a demo to know more.

Conclusion

While cybercrime is increasing consistently, Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) lets you eliminate cyber threats proactively before they harm your systems. It offers continuous vulnerability assessment, validation, risk-based prioritization, complete visibility of the attack surface, etc.

CTEM focuses on real-time asset monitoring and improving remediation techniques to reduce the attack surface. It solves challenges, such as alert fatigue, skill shortages, budget and resource constraints, and integration with existing tools. It utilizes AI-based threat intelligence, integrates security validation techniques, and helps you meet compliance regulations. Ensure to align CTEM with your business objectives to maximize the framework’s effectiveness.

If you are looking for a reliable platform to implement CTEM in your IT infrastructure, let SentinelOne help you. Watch a demo to explore.