What is CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management)?
At its core, CTEM is a proactive cybersecurity strategy that involves continuously monitoring an organization's digital environment for potential threats and vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional security measures that rely on periodic assessments, CTEM provides real-time visibility into an organization's threat landscape, allowing for immediate detection and response to emerging threats.
By leveraging advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, CTEM enables organizations to stay one step ahead of cyber attackers and minimize the risk of security breaches.
What are the benefits of implementing a CTEM strategy?
Implementing a CTEM strategy offers several key benefits for organizations, including improved threat detection and response capabilities, enhanced visibility into the organization's threat landscape, reduced risk of security breaches, and improved compliance with regulatory requirements.
By continuously monitoring their digital environment for potential threats and vulnerabilities, organizations can identify and respond to security incidents more quickly, minimizing the impact on the business. Additionally, CTEM enables organizations to proactively identify and remediate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by cyber attackers, reducing the risk of security breaches and data loss.
How does CTEM differ from traditional threat management approaches?
Unlike traditional threat management approaches, which often rely on point-in-time assessments and periodic scans, CTEM offers continuous monitoring and assessment of an organization's digital assets.
Traditional approaches may overlook emerging threats or vulnerabilities that arise between assessment periods, leaving organizations exposed to potential security risks. CTEM, on the other hand, provides real-time insights into the evolving threat landscape, enabling organizations to respond promptly to emerging threats and vulnerabilities.
In many ways, CTEM is an evolution of vulnerability management, or “risk based vulnerability management” (RBVM). As opposed to RBVM, Continuous Threat Exposure Management places a greater focus on real-time and ongoing monitoring, threat landscapes and attacker behavior, and the use of automation to mobilize and remediate threats.
What are the key components of a CTEM strategy?
A comprehensive CTEM strategy typically consists of several key components, including continuous monitoring, threat intelligence integration, risk assessment, vulnerability management, and incident response capabilities.
Continuous monitoring involves real-time surveillance of an organization's digital assets to detect potential threats and vulnerabilities.
Threat intelligence integrations allow organizations to leverage external threat intelligence sources to enhance their understanding of the current threat landscape.
Risk assessments involve evaluating the potential impact and likelihood of identified threats to prioritize mitigation efforts.
Vulnerability management focuses on identifying and remediating vulnerabilities in the organization's infrastructure, applications, and systems.
Incident response capabilities enable organizations to respond effectively to security incidents and minimize their impact on the business.
How can organizations effectively implement a CTEM strategy?
Effective implementation of a CTEM strategy requires a combination of people, processes, and technology. Organizations should start by establishing clear goals and objectives for their CTEM initiative and obtaining buy-in from key stakeholders.
Next, they should conduct a thorough assessment of their existing security posture to identify areas of weakness and prioritize areas for improvement. Organizations should invest in advanced cybersecurity technologies such as threat intelligence platforms, security analytics tools, and automation solutions to support their CTEM efforts. Additionally, organizations should develop robust processes and procedures for threat detection, incident response, and risk management to ensure that their CTEM strategy is implemented effectively.
The Five Phases of CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management)
1. Scoping
The first phase of CTEM involves security teams identifying the infrastructure that needs to be analyzed and protected. In this phase, security teams should work with the business to identify the most critical assets and resources, both internal and external-facing. As part of scoping, security teams should ideally identify the correct owners of infrastructure and assets, such as code repositories, cloud infrastructure, and more.
2. Discovery
The discovery phase of CTEM is when you discover risks, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats for the assets and resources in scope. Many tools and techniques can be used in this phase to automate discovery- and ideally you can implement continuous threat and vulnerability monitoring across the entire scope environment.
3. Prioritization
The prioritization phase of a CTEM process helps organizations focus their resources and decide what to fix first. Vulnerability prioritization is critical given that most companies have a backlog of vulnerabilities that is bigger than what they can address in total. Ideally, security teams have context at their fingertips that make prioritization easy, combining business logic and contextualized vulnerability data to understand the potential impact of any detected threat.
4. Validation
In the validation phase, you confirm that the vulnerability can be exploited, analyze the potential attack paths that could be carried out, and identify existing mitigation and remediation plans. This phase may consist of attack simulations, additional scans and reviews of systems, and manual analysis of vulnerabilities.
Validation is very difficult without understanding the root cause of vulnerabilities. Oftentimes, security and development teams conduct a lengthy back and forth in the validation phase to understand how to act on detected vulnerabilities. When the root cause of issues are identified, validation becomes much easier as teams know exactly what to fix in order to mitigate risk.
5. Mobilization
The mobilization is the step where security works with the business to carry out remediation and treatments for validated exposures and risks. This requires the help of product owners, developers, and other IT stakeholders who may be responsible for making the actual fixes: deploying patches, changing code, configuring resources differently, and more.
Mobilization may take the form of assistive and automated remediation actions, depending on the risk validated and the resources in scope.
What are some common challenges associated with implementing a CTEM strategy?
While CTEM offers many benefits, organizations may encounter several challenges when implementing a CTEM strategy. These may include:
limited resources and budget constraints
complexity of integrating disparate security technologies and tools
lack of skilled cybersecurity personnel
resistance to change within the organization
To overcome these challenges, organizations should prioritize their CTEM initiatives based on their risk profile and available resources, invest in training and development programs to build cybersecurity expertise within the organization, and foster a culture of collaboration and innovation to drive successful implementation of their CTEM strategy.
Technologies that can help with CTEM
As mentioned, CTEM is a business practice and not an off-the-shelf technology you can buy. That said, there are many technologies that you should consider when building a CTEM practice.
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): ASPM platforms can help unify all vulnerabilities found across your company’s natively built applications, where exposures can be hard to discover, prioritize, and validate.
External Attack Surface Management (EASM): using an automated external attack surface management platform can help continuously identify resources that may be vulnerable and open to attackers, making the prioritization and validation stages easier.
Cloud Native Application Protection (CNAPP): if you have any cloud workloads, using a CNAPP platform will automate the discovery and prioritization of cloud vulnerabilities for continuous visibility
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM): DSPM solutions identify and monitor sensitive data exposures and potential entry points that could be exploited within an organization’s system.
Application Security Testing: AppSec scanners like software composition analysis (SCA), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and more are essential for CTEM processes like identifying application vulnerabilities and exposures.
Breach and attack simulation (BAS): breach and attack simulation platforms can help with validation by carrying out simulated attacks that mimic actual known attack tactics, techniques, and procedures
Vulnerability assessment: traditional vulnerability scanners are another essential tool for discovering vulnerabilities across different kinds of assets: from IoT and mobile devices, to workstations, servers, and more.
How can organizations measure the effectiveness of their CTEM strategy?
Measuring the effectiveness of a CTEM strategy requires organizations to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track their progress over time. These may include metrics such as mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), number of vulnerabilities detected and remediated, and overall risk reduction.
By regularly monitoring these metrics and comparing them against predefined targets, organizations can assess the effectiveness of their CTEM strategy and make adjustments as needed to improve their security posture.
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