It’s been 5 months since we launched our Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) solution, and I’m excited to share the early successes our customers have experienced. CTEM has been a real game changer, uncovering critical exposures that traditional vulnerability management often overlooks. Let’s explore how this proactive approach is helping organizations reduce their attack surface and safeguard their most valuable assets more effectively.
1. Prioritizing What Attackers Are Actively Targeting
One of the biggest challenges security teams face is the overwhelming volume of vulnerabilities. A traditional vulnerability management process might sort these based on severity scores like CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System). However, severity alone doesn’t tell the whole story. A vulnerability classified as "critical" but not actively exploited poses less immediate risk than a medium-severity vulnerability that attackers are actively using.
Imagine your system has two vulnerabilities: one is critical but hasn't been exploited in the wild, and the other is labeled "medium" but is actively being used in attacks. CTEM flags the actively exploited medium vulnerability as a higher priority because it represents an immediate risk to your organization. Traditional vulnerability management might focus on the critical vulnerability, leaving your organization exposed to an attacker who can easily exploit the medium-severity flaw.
2. Focusing on What Matters Most
Traditional vulnerability management often overlooks the business impact of a vulnerability. Not all assets are created equal—what affects a database containing sensitive customer data is far more critical than a minor misconfiguration on a non-sensitive server. CTEM gives security teams the ability to prioritize vulnerabilities based not only on technical severity but also on the potential impact on the business if they were exploited.
In an enterprise financial organization, a critical vulnerability affecting an internal file server might seem urgent to the IT team managing infrastructure. However, if exploiting this vulnerability wouldn’t grant access to sensitive customer data or business-critical financial systems, the security team might deprioritize it. Meanwhile, a medium-risk vulnerability in an externally facing web application that handles customer transactions could be far more dangerous. If this vulnerability is exploited, it could allow attackers to compromise sensitive financial data, leading to severe business disruption. This would create an immediate priority for both security and IT teams to collaborate and mitigate the risk, as the consequences could include regulatory penalties and reputational damage.
3. Understanding the Full Context of Vulnerabilities
One of the key strengths of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is its ability to map how vulnerabilities can be exploited across an organization’s entire infrastructure, offering deep asset context. Instead of viewing vulnerabilities in isolation, CTEM analyzes the relationships between assets, revealing how attackers could move laterally through your network to target critical systems.
For example, an enterprise healthcare organization, where an attacker exploits a medium-risk vulnerability on a perimeter system, such as an externally facing patient portal. At first glance, this vulnerability may not seem highly critical, as it doesn’t directly impact sensitive health data or critical systems. However, with CTEM, security teams can map the entire attack path and gain valuable context about how this vulnerability interacts with other assets in the infrastructure. Leveraging the initial vulnerability, the attacker can infiltrate the network and move laterally. By exploiting misconfigurations or reused credentials, they can escalate privileges and gain access to high-value targets such as electronic health records (EHR) systems, medical devices, or billing platforms containing sensitive patient data.
Whether it's pinpointing vulnerabilities that attackers are actively targeting, understanding the business impact, or mapping out complete attack paths, CTEM gives security teams the tools they need to take action. Learn how to implement CTEM in your organization. Download our CTEM whitepaper to get started.
