What is Exposure Management?

Exposure management is a strategic, business-centric approach to cybersecurity. You can use it to proactively assess and remediate your most critical cyber risks. It goes beyond traditional vulnerability management by unifying business and risk contexts with threat intelligence to expose, prioritize and help you close vulnerabilities while reducing risk and shrinking your attack surface. 

Cybersecurity exposure management gives you holistic visibility into all your assets and environments, including IT, cloud, OT, IoT, and hybrid. You can implement exposure management best practices to ensure your security teams never overlook an asset, its vulnerabilities, dependencies or other potential exposures. 

By identifying all your assets and mapping and analyzing viable attack paths, exposure management finds ways attackers could exploit your security risks and move laterally across your attack surface. 

Unlike traditional vulnerability management and even more advanced risk-based vulnerability management, with continuous visibility and threat intelligence, exposure management can help your teams break through silos between IT and security teams to focus on quickly prioritizing and remediating true business risk. 

And, by aligning cyber and business risk and presenting cyber initiatives in a business context, it improves communication with executives and stakeholders to increase program support.

Exposure management builds on vulnerability management fundamentals. While traditional vulnerability management strategies apply primarily to traditional IT, exposure management builds on that foundation. 

It expands to cover your entire attack surface, including all digital assets and identities, and all forms of preventable risk like common vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and excessive permissions. 

Tenable pioneered the exposure management category in cybersecurity. The company first introduced the cyber exposure ecosystem in October 2017. The first exposure management platform followed in 2018.

Building on exposure management momentum, Gartner created the category for continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) in 2022. 

While exposure management focuses on risk reduction and attack surface management, like comprehensive asset visibility, vulnerability prioritization and exposure remediation, Gartner developed CTEM as a framework to guide exposure management processes. 

Both can help you proactively find and fix critical business and cyber risks. 

Also, a new category of comprehensive exposure management tools called exposure assessment platforms (EAPs) combine vulnerability assessment and vulnerability prioritization technology capabilities into a single platform.

Some of the many reasons why exposure management is important:

• The rapid pace of digital transformation and cloud adoption means organizations face more risk, which legacy vulnerability management tools overlook, like in containers, Kubernetes, cloud apps, cyber-physical systems and hybrid applications. As more asset types require constant attention, your expanded attack surface creates a more complex, distributed environment, which is harder to secure.
  • Exposure management continuously maps and assesses potential exposures across all your environments — cloud, IT, IoT, OT and identities — so you can see all your potential attack vectors.
• Specialized security tools help you manage specific technologies and risks, but can’t give you a complete view of everything in your environment. While they work well for their intended domain, these tools create a fragmented security approach, introducing blind spots and missing unknown assets and vulnerabilities that attackers are quick to exploit.
  • Exposure management consolidates data from all your security and compliance tools to eliminate exposures and give you a comprehensive view of risks and exposed assets.
• Cyber threat actors are increasingly well organized, funded and backed by nation-states. When they use advanced ransomware and tools like hacking-as-a-service, they can execute sophisticated, large-scale attacks with speed and precision, increasing the likelihood of successful and potentially catastrophic breaches. 
  • By identifying and prioritizing exploitable weaknesses, exposure management helps you stay ahead of these advanced cyber threats and common tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs).
• Security tools prioritize risks within their domains but don’t consider relationships between assets, identities and risk. Without this context, your teams could struggle to prevent attackers from establishing footholds, moving laterally and breaching your systems and data.
  • Exposure management correlates asset relationships, misconfigurations, identity risks and potential attack paths to stop lateral movement and prevent breaches.
• Increased breaches, more regulatory mandates and negative financial and legal consequences mean more people are now invested in mitigating cyber risk. It’s no longer just top of mind for your security and compliance teams. Now, bearing some of the burden of ensuring sensitive data is safe, the C-suite and boards of directors are increasingly pressured to answer the question, “What is our cyber exposure?” Yet, many security leaders don’t know how to align cyber risk to business risk or quantify risk posture.
  • With exposure management, you can easily translate technical security risk into business context to quantify your exposures and align them with your organization’s risk appetite and business goals.

With so many assets and a never-ending list of vulnerabilities scored critical or high, some security teams still struggle with effective vulnerability management. What’s driving them to leave those legacy practices behind and embrace exposure management instead?

• Increased regulatory pressure like agencies mandating expanded security controls and breach disclosures.
• Security teams need to reduce the number of vendors and expensive, disparate-point tools to manage better tool sprawl and work within budget limitations.
• With limited staff, gaps in expertise and tight labor markets, organizations are constantly looking for ways to automate and optimize processes. 
• Increased high-profile ransomware attacks and other headline-making breaches have decreased risk tolerance by the board, C-suite, lines of business and investors. 

Once separate solutions, like vulnerability management, external attack surface management (EASM) and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM), are now converging to address dependent security issues.

Exposure management platforms generally include a mix of these components:

• Risk assessment and prioritization capabilities to find and prioritize risk across attack vectors, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity issues and excessive permissions. 
• Asset inventory tools to find and maintain an inventory of assets across your entire attack surface, including configuration issues, risk, dependencies, user data and criticality.
• Attack path analysis capabilities to map assets, find and contextualize risk and prioritize choke-point remediation to disrupt attack paths. 
• The ability to quantify risk exposure for critical business services, processes and functions and deliver tailored dashboards and reports.
• Automated assessments and compliance reporting based on regulations, frameworks or benchmarks.
• Cybersecurity tools and processes that integrate with AI and machine learning, threat intelligence and business context to drive process automation and workflow optimizations.
• Remediation guidance and validation to provide actionable, risk-based recommendations and validate controls to close security gaps.
• Continuous monitoring and adaptive security to track evolving attack surfaces, detect new exposures and automatically adjust security controls based on policies and preset rules to quickly mitigate emerging threats.
• Integration with security operations (SOC) and incident response to streamline exposure data for faster and more efficient threat mitigation.

Here are some of the many benefits of implementing exposure management software:

• Ability to shrink your attack surface and the amount of related threats and incidents.
• Bridge silos and streamline communication between IT and security, and across your organization (compliance, during the software development processes, new technology and application acquisition and implementation, R&D, etc.) including stakeholders like executives and your board.
• Automate and validate remediation with best practices. 
• Business-align and optimize investments in people, processes and technology.
• Reduce vulnerability noise, enhance professional skills and reduce staff churn.
• Streamline compliance with changing regulatory standards like GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, etc. 
• Proactively mitigate business exposure before breach impact.
• Decrease the number of vulnerabilities your team needs to focus on with context and threat intelligence.
• Ability to focus on the most critical threats based on likelihood and business impact.
• Mature your overall security with continuous monitoring, vulnerability scans, risk assessments and vulnerability remediation.
• Decrease security and incident response costs.
• Implement faster, more targeted responses to potential threats with real-time data and insights.

While some exposure management and vulnerability management best practices may overlap, they differ. 

Exposure management draws on risk-based vulnerability management fundamentals. Here are some other key differences:

• Exposure management identifies and reduces your entire attack surface.
  • Vulnerability management targets specific vulnerabilities and other security issues within systems and applications.
• Exposure management prioritizes assets and risks based on potential vulnerabilities.
  • Vulnerability management typically addresses individual security issues.
• Exposure management is more proactive. You can use it to map potential attack paths.
  • Vulnerability management is reactive and focuses on patching known vulnerabilities.
• Exposure management has comprehensive asset visibility, including shadow IT.
  • Vulnerability management usually focuses on known IT infrastructure.
• Exposure management emphasizes continuous threat monitoring. 
  • Vulnerability management typically addresses existing vulnerabilities on a set basis, like once a month, once a quarter, etc.

The role of attack path analysis in exposure management 

Attack path analysis (APA) is a risk management strategy to proactively discover potential paths attackers could take to breach a system or network. 

By mapping attack paths, you can better understand how vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and permissions combine to create exposures.

APA helps you think like an attacker to find potential security weaknesses and fix them before they lead to a cyber breach. 

Attack path management is an integral part of exposure management. It helps you see where you have a potential attack vector, how a threat actor could exploit it and how they move laterally, often undetected, across your environment to escalate privileges, steal data or even take your systems hostage with ransomware or other malware.

Historically, security teams have overlooked some critical potential attack paths, like in Active Directory (AD). By applying exposure management best practices to Active Directory, you can continuously discover AD misconfigurations, excessive permissions and other attack gateways. 

Without this approach, bad actors can actively exploit Active Directory weaknesses to get an initial foothold and then quickly escalate privileges. Once they do, they can move across your network and create backdoors that are difficult to detect and close. 

Applying APA as part of your comprehensive exposure management program can prevent attackers from compromising your domain controllers, deploying malware or taking complete control of your enterprise.

With APA, you can also better prioritize attack path risk remediation to proactively break attack path chains. For example, as part of your exposure management plan, you could turn off unnecessary admin privileges to prevent movement and limit domain controller access.

You can also use attack path analysis to mature your exposure management processes. For example, you can conduct real-world attack simulations to see how attackers would move through your environments and then shore up security controls to close those gaps.

Cyber threat exposure management (CTEM), a concept introduced by Gartner, is a framework for your exposure management program. 

CTEM is a structured and proactive cybersecurity approach that emphasizes effective evaluation and prioritization for exposure mitigation on a continuous basis.

In traditional vulnerability management programs, common vulnerability scoring systems, like CVSS, score most vulnerabilities at a medium security threat level. Yet, CVSS scores about a quarter of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) as high. With more than 280,00 CVEs in the National Vulnerability Database, your security teams could have more than 70,000 vulnerabilities they think they need to address.

Static scores create a constant loop of reactive security. Without threat context, your teams are busy trying to patch vulnerabilities that may never impact your operations. They can overlook actual risk. CTEM resolves this because it applies specifically to your assets, the way your organization uses them.

Think of CTEM as the foundation for your comprehensive exposure management program. Unlike context-agnostic CVSS scores, CTEM includes real-world threat intelligence and considers elements such as asset criticality and active exploit potential to help your teams focus on vulnerabilities that are the greatest risk for your organization.

With automated and continuous asset discovery and vulnerability assessment for your environments, CTEM can quickly find new potential attack vectors in the cloud and hybrid environments, including for shadow IT.

CTEM incorporates attack path analysis to find related dependencies so your teams can identify attack chains and proactively block potential threat actor lateral movement within your systems.

And, because CTEM also includes security validation and testing, you can stay ahead of attackers by ensuring your controls function as intended. When they don’t, you can mitigate those risks before attackers find them. 

Want to learn more about CTEM and its role in exposure management? Check out our “What is CTEM?” page for a deeper dive.

Cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) is a cybersecurity discipline that gives you comprehensive visibility into all of your assets, including all devices, apps, users and services. 

Designed for all environments — cloud, IT, OT, IoT and hybrid — CAASM is an exposure management tool to find, inventory, manage and secure all your assets. CAASM can even help you find and assess all internet-facing assets on your external attack surface, including the ones your IT and security teams aren’t actively aware of.

CAASM is proactive and guides exposure reduction. Used as part of exposure management, it will unify your asset data in real time to illuminate security blind spots. 

When implemented with broader security strategies like threat detection and vulnerability management, your organization will be better prepared to mitigate internal and external threats before attackers can find and exploit them. 

CAASM can also support your zero-trust and least-privilege strategies by ensuring that only authorized users have access to critical assets to further shrink your attack surface. 

Want to learn more about CAASM and its role in exposure management? Check out our “What is CAASM?” page for a deeper dive.

Legacy vulnerability management practices traditionally focused on securing internal assets. 

Long gone are the days when mere firewalls and air-gapping systems were enough protection against potential cyber threats. 

External attack surface management, a subset of attack surface management, extends outdated and ineffective vulnerability management practices into broader and contextualized exposure management. EASM finds and monitors all your external-facing assets so you can secure them.

You can use EASM for domains, APIs and third-party integrations, cloud apps and services, public-facing IPs, web apps and other endpoints. It can even discover unmanaged and abandoned resources like shadow IT and those legacy apps and software no one remembers installing.

In exposure management, you can seamlessly apply EASM with other tools to unify attack surface data, like configuration management databases (CMDBs), vulnerability management platforms and exposure assessment solutions. 

By detecting potential entry points, like open ports, outdated software, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, you can see your attack surface as an attacker may see it. 

EASM gives you real-time visibility into changes within your attack surface to quickly identify and close these attack paths. It’s an effective way to securely close your external perimeter and limit the potential for lateral movement and privilege escalation.

Want to learn more about EASM and its role in exposure management? Check out our “What is EASM?” page for a deeper dive.

1. Know your assets. Use an exposure management solution with asset discovery capabilities to find all your assets, including shadow IT, across all your environments. Understand asset criticality and impact on operations if impacted by a cyber breach. This includes asset relationships, privileges and other dependencies.
2. Know and expose your critical risks. 
3. Use an exposure management platform with AI, machine learning and other threat intelligence to contextually understand impact of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security issues.
4. Prioritize threat remediation based on greatest risk to your unique environment, not arbitrary CVE scoring.
5. Work with stakeholders to establish key performance indicators to evaluate your exposure management program’s success and impact. Align cyber risk strategies to business goals. Benchmark your program against industry standards, within your organization and against competitors.
6. Develop and, where possible, automate assessment and response workflows.
7. Routinely test controls to ensure they function as intended.
8. Think like an attacker. Use exposure management tools to find potential attack vectors and related dependencies to proactively mitigate them before threat actors find them.
9. Continuously assess your exposure management policies, procedures and controls. Make adjustments as needed.
10. Focus on collaboration and communications, not just between security and IT, but across your organization, up to your executives and board members, to build program support.

Five steps to exposure management success:

1. Know your attack surface and set the scope of your exposure management program. 
   • Identify and inventory your assets across IT, IoT, OT, cloud, unseen assets, apps and identities. 
2. Expose cyber risk.
   • Find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, excessive permissions, identity issues and other security weaknesses using automated and continuous vulnerability assessments and risk management capabilities within an exposure management platform.
3. Prioritize cyber risk and align with business context. 
   • Map your attack surface (assets, identities and risks) and correlate it to what matters most — your mission-critical services, processes and functions.
4. Remediate your exposures.
   • Use threat intelligence, AI and machine learning to understand exposure context. Prioritize risk remediation with the highest probability of material impact on your essential business functions. 
5. Focus on continuous monitoring and improvement.
   • As your organization flexes and scales, your attack surface and related vulnerabilities change with it. Exposure management is not a set-it-and-forget-it, point-in-time process. Continuously monitor your environment for changes. Routinely test your security controls to ensure they function as intended, and update your exposure management processes as needed.

1. You don’t have an accurate inventory of all your assets across all your environments. Existing processes, like point-in-time vulnerability assessments, don’t discover shadow IT or other devices that spin up and down quickly or are short-lived.
   • Exposure management software unifies visibility into all of your assets — everywhere. With continuous attack surface assessments, you can see your most pressing cyber threats in real time so you can take actionable, proactive steps to fix them.
2. You have too much vulnerability data with no context, so you don’t know what to address first. Worse yet, disparate tools silo data leaving you with blind spots and unknown threats.
   • An exposure management solution with AI, machine learning and other threat intelligence tools gives you contextualized exposure data with deeper meaning than arbitrary, static scoring systems like CVSS. When paired with automated asset criticality findings, like Tenable’s Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR), you can cut through all the noise and know which security issues your teams should address first.
3. You don’t know how to communicate your cybersecurity program goals, successes and challenges to your executives. Your program needs additional resources and funding, but you don’t know how to quantify all this technical data in a way that resonates with other non-technical stakeholders.
   • Exposure management gets everyone on the same page. An exposure management platform with asset and vulnerability mapping capabilities can automatically link your critical assets and risks to business processes and other important workflows. This will give you insight into how each vulnerability could derail business continuity. With cyber risk data right at your fingertips, you can translate exposures into metrics that your executives and other stakeholders understand, for example, financial impact of downtime, potential compliance fines and penalties, or brand and reputation damage.
4. You’re so busy reacting to security issues you never get to think ahead and seek out potential threats before attackers can take advantage of them.
   • With automated, real-time threat intelligence and asset discovery, an exposure management solution can analyze your attack surface based on known vulnerabilities attackers actively exploit in the wild. Paired with other contextualized threat data, you can stop guessing which vulnerabilities need your attention and take proactive steps to address critical threats before a breach. 
5. While your IT and security teams focus on your known assets and environments, others elsewhere are busy adding new third-party tools to daily workflows. Sometimes you know about them. Sometimes you don’t. Worse yet, you’re unsure if all vendors are appropriately vetted and use adequate security and compliance controls. You certainly don’t have the time to dig through cybersecurity programs for every new vendor and third-party app.
   • An exposure management tool with EASM capabilities actively monitors third-party apps and vendors to discover and assess all internet-facing assets. Continuous asset and vulnerability scanning can help you spot these risks without manual, time-consuming labor. With consolidated third-party vendor data in your exposure management platform, you can quickly see which vulnerabilities pose the greatest threat without digging through mountains of data with no context. If you’re in the market for exposure management software, consider an exposure management vendor that offers integrated, actionable and best-practice remediation recommendations so you can quickly resolve third-party risk.

Years ago, Tenable had a vision for the evolution of the vulnerability management market. Today, exposure management is integral in protecting modern attack surfaces. 

Limited resources, hiring challenges, changing compliance regulations and expanding complex attack surfaces drive exposure management adoption today. Looking forward, here are some trends that may impact its evolution:

• AI and machine learning will advance and synthesize more data, creating faster, more accurate threat detection, prioritization and response.
• Advancements in proactive identity and access management capabilities will automatically ensure only authorized users can access the right data at the right time. More organizations will adopt zero trust and least privilege principles to decrease the chance of unauthorized access and lateral movement. Adaptive authentication practices may also take hold across the industry to reduce the chance of stolen credentials by verifying users based on behavioral analytics. 
• Dynamic attack surface management (DASM) will be integral in exposure management. With continuous monitoring, these advancements, driven by AI and machine learning, will ensure real-time threat assessment and response alignment as an attack surface changes.
• Exposure mapping accuracy and speed will increase. Working hand in hand with DASM, attack path mapping will update in real time, finding dependencies and exposures, to limit attacker access and movement.
• Risk assessments will have more contextual, actionable data to inform stronger risk reduction and yield better alignment with business processes, workflows and goals.
• Exposure management platforms will have more advanced data unification and analytics capabilities and will integrate more tools into a single solution for enhanced attack surface visibility.

As the exposure management market expands, more solutions will crowd the space, making it challenging to know which platform has the capabilities and features to best meet your organization’s needs.

Here’s what to look for in an exposure management platform:

• An easy-to-understand and user-friendly interface.
• Real-time, continuous asset and vulnerability scanning and inventory across all environments, including capabilities for third-party vendor management.
• Tools like automation and AI to prioritize vulnerability remediation based on real-time threat intelligence and business impact.
• Seamless integration with your existing cybersecurity tools like system information and event management (SIEM) systems, your SOC, cloud security platforms and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) systems.
• Attack surface mapping and external attack surface management with dynamic mapping that adjusts as your attack surface changes.
• Data unification for all your cybersecurity resources with advanced data analytics and customizable reporting.
• Can automate compliance audits and reports and align to industry standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA and other laws and regulations.
• The ability to flex and scale exposure management capabilities as your organization changes.
• Consider working with a vendor with use cases, customer reviews, trials or demos, implementation strategies, onboarding and ongoing customer support.

What is exposure management in cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity exposure management gives you comprehensive visibility into your modern attack surface so you can better understand and quantify cyber risk to make more informed business decisions. With a holistic view of potential exposures, including identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity issues and excessive permissions, you can address cyber risks from technical and business perspectives.

Which tools are commonly used for exposure management?

Some tools commonly used for exposure management include: 

• Continuous vulnerability scanning to detect security weaknesses
• Attack path analysis to find and correlate exploitable pathways
• Identity exposure assessment to discover misconfigurations in systems like Active Directory (AD)
• Cloud security posture management (CSPM) to secure cloud environments
• EASM to identify and mitigate risks associated with internet-facing assets
• CTEM to assess and prioritize threats to proactively reduce risk
• Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) to monitor and manage cloud to prevent excessive access and reduce identity-based attacks
• CAASM for comprehensive visibility into all assets, internal and external, to identify security gaps and improve attack surface management
• Web app scanning to find vulnerabilities in web apps and APIs to prevent attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS)
• OT security to secure operational technology environments by discovering vulnerabilities in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices and industrial control systems (ICS)
• AI and exposure analytics for real-time insights into your current security posture so you can track and measure cyber risk over time.

Which industries benefit most from exposure management?

All industries can benefit from exposure management. However, industries with complex and expansive attack surfaces, like finance, healthcare, energy and manufacturing could benefit significantly from exposure management. These sectors handle sensitive data and critical infrastructure so they need effective security and compliance controls.

How do I integrate exposure management into cybersecurity frameworks?

Integrate exposure management into cybersecurity frameworks by implementing continuous asset discovery, risk assessment, attack path analysis and remediation processes. 

What are the challenges of implementing exposure management?

Some exposure management implementation challenges include:

• Without correlating vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identities and attack paths, you can’t understand your true exposure.
• It’s challenging to identify and manage all internal, external, cloud and OT assets, which can create blind spots and unknown security gaps.
• Lack of standardized methods to measure and communicate cyber risk in business context.
• Without automation, exposure management can be slow, reactive and resource-intensive.
• Keeping pace with changing industry and government security mandates.
• Complex and evolving attack surfaces and attack techniques mean you must constantly assess and update your environment for proactive security.
• Legacy and siloed security tools make it difficult to consolidate risk insights for a unified exposure view.
• Without context-driven risk prioritization, your security teams face alert fatigue and inefficient remediation workflows.
• Lack of cybersecurity expertise and resources to implement and benefit from exposure management.

What is the difference between CAASM and EASM?

CAASM and EASM are similar but have different scopes. Cyber asset attack surface management focuses on comprehensive visibility into all assets within your internal environment. External attack surface management identifies and manages internet-facing assets potentially exposed to external threats. Both are essential for exposure management.

Can I automate exposure management?

Yes. With the right exposure management solution, like Tenable One, you can automate exposure management implementation and ongoing processes.

Ready to take the next step in your exposure management journey? Follow along with our Exposure Management Academy blog series, and learn all about how to implement your own exposure management program.