No organization can claim to be completely secure today. With businesses expanding and digital networks becoming more intricate, threats and vulnerabilities have become inevitable.
Security teams constantly face sophisticated cyber threats capable of disrupting operations and compromising sensitive data. To protect their operations and data, businesses need a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity.
Threat Exposure Management (TEM) is the systematic assessment, identification, prioritization, and management of vulnerabilities and risks within an organization’s digital infrastructure. This ongoing process requires vigilant monitoring of the digital ecosystem to promptly detect emerging vulnerabilities and threats.
What is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a pragmatic and effective systemic approach to continuously refine priorities and address the challenges of modern security. It reduces cyber risk by providing actionable visibility into your organizational security posture. A well-implemented CTEM program can help prevent attacks by helping businesses optimize their security posture based on real-world threat intelligence.
How to Leverage CTEM for Active Threat Detection
To stay ahead of cybercriminals, organizations need to adopt a five-step Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) program. These steps are:
- Continuous Assessment: Constantly monitor your organization’s assets and stay updated on the latest threat intelligence.
- Mindful Identification: Conduct a comprehensive discovery process to uncover known and previously unidentified threats and risks.
- Risk Prioritization: Assess vulnerabilities based on the organization’s risk appetite and potential impact.
- Threat Validation: Confirm an attacker’s ability to exploit a vulnerability and analyze all potential attack pathways.
- Remediation: Implement a clear and collaborative plan to address identified vulnerabilities.
The Role of Automation in CTEM Platforms
Automation plays a crucial role in CTEM platforms. By freeing up human resources for more value-added tasks, automation helps align vulnerability management to organizational risk appetite and set a practical time frame for security remediation. It also enables proactive defense strategies, provides holistic cybersecurity coverage, and facilitates early detection of threats.
Business Benefits of CTEM Platforms
A proactive approach to security is better than a reactive approach. Here are some notable business benefits of using a CTEM platform:
- Proactive Defense Strategy: Utilize security investments to proactively remediate attack paths rather than relying solely on reactive measures.
- Holistic Cybersecurity Coverage: Address vulnerabilities across various technological frontiers such as cloud, mobile, SaaS, IoT, and OT.
- Secure API-level Integrations: Safeguard the organization by identifying and securing potential threat vectors arising from API-level integrations with external parties.
- Early Detection of Threats: Detect and prevent bot-net attacks and sensitive data exfiltration in real-time.
- Definitive Exploitable Attack Paths: Gain insights into how the organization appears from an attacker’s viewpoint.
- Continuous Security Testing: Move beyond periodic Pen Testing and Red Teaming cycles by implementing an automated platform for continuous security testing.
- Integrated Exposure Processes: Eliminate compartmentalization challenges by integrating exposure processes like vulnerability scanning, threat intelligence management, and penetration testing.
- Guided Prioritization: Alleviate the workload related to exposure by providing clear guidance on prioritization, risk assessment, and scope adjustments.
- Automated Approach for Ongoing Prioritization: Adopt a repeatable and automated approach for assessing exposure in a continuously evolving IT ecosystem.
- Vulnerability Configuration Analysis: Assess and address vulnerabilities by understanding the configurations that may make the organization susceptible to attacks.
- Quantifying Third-Party Risks: Address the demand to quantify risks associated with third parties, ensuring comprehensive risk management.
Common CTEM Platform Use Cases
CTEM is universally applicable, offering proactive threat monitoring, business-aligned prioritization, and continuous remediation suggestions. It’s especially relevant for sectors handling sensitive data, such as finance, healthcare, IT, and e-commerce.
How ASM and EASM are Evolving to Support CTEM
According to a Gartner report, Attack surface management (ASM) and external attack surface management (EASM) are evolving to support CTEM solutions as many capabilities are being acquired and consolidated. This research offers a comprehensive analysis of the key phases in emerging technologies and trends for ASM, delving into the opportunities within this emerging market until 2028.
Phases of ASM:
1. Siloed ASM: This phase focuses on providing added visibility of assets through native discovery and some level of prioritization of the vulnerabilities/issues associated with these assets.
2. Advanced ASM: In this phase, ASM will be incorporated with continuous threat and exposure management programs, facilitating ongoing exposure monitoring and empowering prioritization of vulnerabilities.
3. Mature ASM: In this phase, ASM will become more intricately intertwined with cybersecurity validation, involving scrutinizing how potential attackers might exploit identified threat exposures, and how existing protection systems and processes would respond.
How CyberMindr Can Help Enable and Implement CTEM?
CyberMindr is a SaaS-based attack path discovery platform that offers proactive monitoring of your organization’s digital infrastructure. The platform is developed to identify real vulnerabilities and confirmed attack paths, surpassing contemporary ASM tools and positioning itself between the Advanced and Mature ASM stages.
Current ASM and EASM tools only cover the first three phases of CTEM, leaving security teams with a deluge of irrelevant data in their scan reports. In contrast, CyberMindr’s innovative platform offers a comprehensive solution, covering all steps of CTEM except remediation.
CyberMindr’s multi-stage attack engine performs 15,000+ automated live checks on discovered assets and monitors 300+ hacker forums to gather intelligence on the latest attackers’ Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). The CyberMindr validation engine ensures the legitimacy of identified vulnerabilities, providing a more accurate and efficient analysis.
In the current landscape, CyberMindr surpasses contemporary ASM tools, positioning itself approximately five years ahead in innovation. This places it between the Advanced and Mature ASM stages, making it a leading solution for attack surface discovery.
Moreover, CyberMindr’s reports include remediation suggestions to aid internal security teams in closing security gaps. By offering a complete solution, CyberMindr is revolutionizing the way businesses approach cybersecurity due diligence.
CTEM: The Next Generation of Threat Intelligence
With the digital landscape encompassing a multitude of assets, it’s essential to prioritize security strategies based on their associated risks. CISOs must strategically shift from the traditional approach of identifying vulnerabilities to embracing a risk-centric perspective, actively minimizing real-world exposures. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) offers a framework for ongoing security assessment, identification, prioritization, validation, and remediation. While ASM and EASM tools enable CTEM, they may fall short in covering all process steps. CyberMindr’s innovative platform comprehensively addresses all steps, providing businesses with the tools they need to stay ahead of potential threats.