CTEM in Practice: Prioritization, Validation, and Outcomes That Matter

"CTEM, as defined by Gartner, emphasizes a 'continuous' cycle of identifying, prioritizing, and remediating exploitable exposures across your attack surface, which improves your overall security posture as an outcome. It's not a one-off scan and a result delivered via a tool; it's an operational model built on five steps: Scoping - assess your threats and vulnerabilities and identify what's most important: assets, processes, and adversaries. Discovery - Map exposures and attack paths across your environment to anticipate an adversary's actions."

"Cybersecurity teams increasingly want to move beyond looking at threats and vulnerabilities in isolation. It's not only about what could go wrong (vulnerabilities) or who might attack (threats), but where they intersect in your actual environment to create real, exploitable exposure. Which exposures truly matter? Can attackers exploit them? Are our defenses effective? Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) can provide a useful approach to the cybersecurity teams in their journey towards unified threat/vulnerability or exposure management."

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a continuous cycle of identifying, prioritizing, validating, and remediating exploitable exposures across the attack surface to improve security posture. CTEM operationalizes five steps: scoping assets, processes, and adversaries; discovery of exposures and attack paths; prioritization based on realistic exploitability; validation through safe attack simulations; and mobilization to drive remediation and process improvements. CTEM integrates vulnerability assessment, vulnerability management, attack surface management, testing, and simulation to enable recording and reporting of potential impact to cyber risk reduction. Tool proliferation has created siloes that hinder unified exposure management and evidence-driven remediation.

Read at The Hacker News