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Blueprint for Success: Implementing a CTEM Operation. The attack surface isn't what it once was and it's becoming a nightmare to protect. A constantly expanding and evolving attack surface means risk to the business has skyrocketed and current security measures are struggling to keep it protected. If you've clicked on this article, there's a good chance you're looking for solutions to manage this risk. In 2022, a new framework was coined by Gartner to address these challenges - Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). Since then, putting this framework into action has become a priority across many organizations for the profound improvement it is expected to make toward maintaining a high level of security readiness and resilience. CTEM provides a continuous and comprehensive view of the attack surface and the exposures within it, testing whether security controls are effectively blocking the potential exploitation of exposures, and then streamlining the mobilization towards remediating the selected vulnerabilities. Adopting CTEM can quickly become overwhelming as it involves the orchestration of many disparate and moving parts. Pulling together digital assets, workloads, networks, identities, and data across the enterprise. Therefore to simplify this, we have broken down the framework to its pillars, providing manageable steps that guide you through this process of making exposure management - manageable. Pillar #1: Expand your Visibility of the Attack Surface A primary challenge with asset management is its limited scope. It provides only a sectioned view of the attack surface typically concentrating solely on on-premise vulnerabilities, with no scope for actioning the vulnerability data it generates. CTEM provides greater visibility into all types of exposures across the attack surface - internal, external, and cloud - to help organizations better understand their real security risk profile. The process starts by scoping the environment for digital assets in stages. We recommend an initial scope that includes either: At a second stage, consider expanding the scope to include digital risk protection, which adds greater visibility into the attack surface. Once the scope is determined, organizations should determine their risk profiles by discovering exposures on high-priority assets. It should also incorporate the misconfiguration of assets, especially as they relate to security controls, and other weaknesses, such as counterfeit assets or poor responses to phishing tests. Pillar #2: Level up your Vulnerability Management Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been the cornerstone of many organizations' cybersecurity strategies, focusing on identifying and patching against known CVEs. However, with the growing complexity of the IT environment and the enhanced capabilities of threat actors, VM alone is no longer enough to maintain the cybersecurity posture of the enterprise. This is particularly evident when taking into account the escalating number of published CVEs each year. Last year alone, there were 29,085 CVEs and only 2-7% of these were ever exploited in the wild. This makes becoming patch-perfect an unrealistic goal, especially as this doesn't take into account non-patchable vulnerabilities such as misconfigurations, Active Directory issues, unsupported third-party software, stolen and leaked credentials and more, which will account for over 50% of enterprise exposures by 2026. CTEM shifts the focus to prioritizing exposures based on their exploitability and their risk impact on critical assets as opposed to CVSS scores, chronology, or vendor scoring. This ensures that the most sensitive digital assets to the organization's continuity and objectives are addressed first. Prioritization is therefore based on security gaps that are easily exploitable and simultaneously provide access to sensitive digital assets. The combination of both causes these exposures, which typically represent a fraction of all discovered exposures, to be prioritized. Pillar #3 Validation Converts CTEM from theory to proven strategy The final pillar of the CTEM strategy, validation, is the mechanism to prevent the exploitation of security gaps. To ensure the ongoing efficacy of security controls, validation needs to be offensive in nature, by emulating attacker methods. There are four strategies for testing your environment like an attacker, each mirroring the techniques employed by adversaries: CTEM: Invest Now - Continually Reap the Results With all the different elements of people, processes, and tools in a CTEM strategy, it's easy to get overwhelmed. However, keep a few things in mind: Learn more about how to implement a validation-first CTEM strategy with Pentera. Continuous Attack Surface Discovery & Penetration Testing Continuously discover, prioritize, & mitigate exposures with evidence-backed ASM, Pentesting, and Red Teaming.