What is CTEM?

A continuous threat exposure management program is structured to help your teams effectively evaluate and prioritize risk mitigation while continuously maturing your cybersecurity posture.

Established by Gartner in 2022, “a continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) program is a set of processes and capabilities that allow enterprises to continually and consistently evaluate the accessibility, exposure and exploitability of an enterprise’s digital and physical assets.”

CTEM is a continuous cycle that adapts to change on an ongoing, five-step basis. Each step supports a different function. 

1. Establish the scope of the attack surface you want to assess. Prioritize critical assets, systems and business processes to align your program with organizational priorities. Focus on the most impactful areas first.
2. Identify assets and exposures, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, insecure credentials and unapproved devices or services to gain visibility into IT, OT, cloud, IoT and external systems.
3. Prioritize exposures based on factors like severity, exploitability, asset criticality, business context and impact likelihood to optimize processes and resource allocation. 
4. Test identified risks through simulations like penetration testing or red/purple team exercises to confirm vulnerability exploitability and understand potential attack paths. Validation helps refine prioritization and remediation plans.
5. Mitigate or remediate identified and validated risks, including compensating controls or changes to processes and configurations. Collaborate across your IT, security and business teams.

CTEM is different from vulnerability management. It addresses modern attack surface management complexities, whereas traditional vulnerability management focuses on identifying and patching vulnerabilities. CTEM expands coverage scope to include a business-aligned, proactive approach to managing exposures across your attack surface.

Key CTEM and vulnerability management differences

• Vulnerability management programs begin with software vulnerabilities on IT systems.
  • CTEM gives unified visibility across IT, cloud, OT, IoT and identity systems and evaluates all potential exposures.
• Advanced vulnerability management programs apply a risk-based approach to prioritization. 
  • CTEM uses additional relational and business context to expose toxic risk combinations, including critical asset attack paths, so you can better understand potential risk impact.
• Traditional security programs use separate proactive security tools, such as vulnerability assessments and vulnerability management, and reactive security controls like threat and incident response. 
  • CTEM aligns data, workflows and objectives across these separate functions. For example, sharing attack paths and business context to improve decision-making. 
• Vulnerability management programs are usually linear and IT-focused. 
  • CTEM emphasizes the importance of business alignment to better understand relationships between assets, risks and the business services, processes or functions they support.

Exposure management has three core pillars. Each pillar addresses different aspects of understanding and mitigating risks.

1. Attack surface management: Focuses on understanding how your attack surface appears to potential attackers. 
   1. Involves identifying and prioritizing cyber risks visible from an external perspective, like exposed systems or misconfigurations.
   2. Solutions include external attack surface management (EASM) for external visibility and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) for internal asset discovery.
       
2. Vulnerability management: Identifies software vulnerabilities and configurations that increase cyberattack risk. Tools such as vulnerability assessment and risk prioritization can help you discover, categorize and prioritize vulnerabilities for remediation based on risk.
    
3. Posture validation: Evaluates how your defenses and processes would perform in a real-world attack. Tools such as CAASM and exposure assessment platforms can collect information from various vendor sources, detailing which existing controls help validate whether a threat actor can exploit an exposure — for example, no EDR agent on a device.

Exposure assessment platforms (EAPs) are crucial in continuous threat exposure management processes. They centralize identification, prioritization and cyber risk management across diverse asset types. 

EAPs continuously detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other exposures. They also consolidate data to enhance visibility and guide remediation. EAPs integrate with other discovery tools for actionable insights, a cornerstone of modern exposure management.

How EAPs support CTEM programs

EAPs are essential for implementing continuous threat exposure management. Their tools and data address scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation and mobilization. 

EAPs enable:

1. Comprehensive visibility with aggregated data across IT, OT, cloud and IoT environments. You get a holistic view of your attack surface to track all assets, including shadow IT and third-party components.
2. Contextual prioritization based on severity, asset criticality, exploitation likelihood and business impact to focus remediation on security issues that have the greatest potential to impact your organization.
3. Risk-informed decision-making by consolidating exposure data into a single pane of glass. EAPs support strategic decisions with actionable insights on high-risk vulnerabilities and potential impact.

CAASM tools give you unified visibility into your internal attack surface. CAASM solutions aggregate data from disparate security tools and platforms to identify and understand your assets, configurations, vulnerabilities and security gaps.

CAASM aligns with and supports CTEM cycles:

• Defines attack surface internal scope by identifying assets across IT, OT, cloud and other environments.
• Enables detailed internal asset inventory and risk profiling, highlighting misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and shadow IT.
• Integrates asset criticality and business context to prioritize risks.
• Facilitates testing with assessment tool integrations or feeding asset data into simulations.
• Provides actionable insights to remediate identified risks and expose cyber threats.

EASM tools continuously monitor internet-facing assets to expose and assess vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other cyber risks attackers could exploit.

EASM aligns with and supports CTEM cycles:

• Defines external-facing assets like public cloud environments, third-party integrations, and shadow IT.
• Continuously identifies and maps externally visible assets and associated risks.
• Highlights critical external exposures, such as those susceptible to active exploits or with dependencies on high-value systems.
• Supports validation through attack simulations or manual testing of external risks.
• Provides actionable data to secure exposed assets, often involving collaboration with IT or third-party providers.

Continuous threat exposure management tools offer many benefits:

• Consolidates insights across IT, OT, cloud and IoT to break down security silos.
• Identifies and addresses risks before attackers exploit them.
• Focuses on high-impact vulnerabilities based on severity, exploitability and business impact.
• Streamlines workflows and reduces manual risk assessment and remediation.
• Ensures cybersecurity controls protect critical business functions and support strategic business objectives.
• Mitigates advanced threats by mapping and addressing attack paths and lateral movements.
• Provides contextual insights for informed risk and resource allocation decisions.
• Supports regulatory compliance with clear documentation and risk management processes.
• Refines security strategies to respond to evolving threats and organizational changes.
• Elevates cybersecurity practices by integrating them into a dynamic, iterative framework.

There are many CTEM platforms on the market, but they don’t have the same capabilities and features. The right CTEM solution for your organization should directly align its capabilities to address your unique security challenges.

Here are five recommended steps to help you on your CTEM buyer’s journey:

1. Understand your needs and security goals. Before you dig into CTEM vendors and product capabilities, you must understand your organization’s risk appetite, security and compliance requirements and program goals.

   Ask:

   • Where do we have gaps in attack surface visibility?
   • What are our most critical security goals?
   • Which compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) must the solution support?
   • Do we need to improve vulnerability management, threat detection or both? 
      

2. Involve key stakeholders across departments and teams. A CTEM can provide visibility across multiple departments, such as IT, risk management, security, DevOps, and executives. Understanding their needs will help you prioritize key CTEM capabilities for each solution you evaluate.

   Ask:

   • Which key stakeholders should we include in this process?
   • Which specific needs or challenges do different departments (security, IT, risk) have?
   • How will the CTEM align with our overall business goals?
   • What level of training or support will stakeholders need to effectively use the CTEM?
      

3. Set scope. Understand your current attack surface to determine what the solution should cover.

   Ask:

   • Which environments are part of our attack surface? (cloud, on-prem, hybrid, OT, IoT, etc.)?
   • Do we need the CTEM to handle specific asset types?
   • What is our desired visibility level across our entire attack surface?
   • Can coverage scope evolve as our organization grows or changes?
      

4. Evaluate features and capabilities. Marketing lures you in, but to make the best decision, do your homework to understand each CTEM’s functionality.

   Ask:

   • How does the CTEM prioritize vulnerabilities based on business context?
   • Does it have automated remediation workflows?
   • How does the tool support attack path analysis to visualize exploit potential?
   • Can it scale and flex with my business needs?
   • Does it have real-time detection capabilities for emerging threats and attack vectors?
      

5. Assess integrations. A CTEM that doesn’t work with your existing security tools may be more of a hindrance than helpful.

   Ask:

   • How well does it integrate with our existing security tools (e.g., SIEM, SOAR)?
   • How quickly can we deploy and integrate the CTEM into our current workflows?
   • Does it have flexible configuration capabilities to meet evolving security needs?
   • How well does it correlate and consolidate data from different sources to improve threat detection and response?
      

Check out Tenable's additional CTEM resources and products to gain further understanding of continuous threat exposure management and how it can strengthen your cybersecurity.