Nobody would argue that vulnerability scanners are a negative addition to the cybersecurity landscape. These days, it’s much easier for you to catch vulnerabilities and be alerted in near-real time to their presence. But this has become a double-edged sword for vulnerability managers—you're now overloaded with hundreds, even thousands, of vulnerability findings, all screaming "CRITICAL!"
And when 80% of your vulnerabilities are marked critical or high, none of them seem critical at all.
You might manually prioritize vulnerabilities, but the sheer volume you face every day makes this process extremely tedious, if not impossible. You need a more refined approach—one that accounts for more than just the existence of vulnerabilities. You need to factor in exploitability, business impact, and relevance to your organization’s critical assets.
This is where Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) comes in. It’s not enough to simply find vulnerabilities; the real challenge is knowing which ones matter most and taking action before they’re exploited.
Why Does CTEM Matter?
As your cloud environments expand and become more complex, managing and securing internal and external assets becomes increasingly challenging. Traditional vulnerability scores are no longer enough. You need to go beyond severity ratings, considering exploitability, the presence of existing security controls, risk tolerance, and business criticality to prioritize remediation effectively.
JupiterOne’s CTEM solution helps you anticipate threats and vulnerabilities in real time, focusing on your most business-critical assets—the crown jewels of your operation. It highlights only exploitable vulnerabilities with the highest potential impact, ensuring your resources are allocated where they are needed most and helping you avoid the "critical overload" problem.
Use Business Context to Prioritize Vulnerabilities That Matter
Let’s take an analogy: imagine a locksmith tells you that 50% of the locks in your home are faulty. The catch? Only you can decide which locks matter most—your front door, your safe, or perhaps the shed in the backyard. Vulnerability scanners are like that locksmith—they can identify more risks from code, workloads, servers, and devices than ever before, but they lack the business context to know which vulnerabilities are related to critical assets, core projects, customer data, or being publicly exploitable.
You need to see vulnerabilities in the context of real business impact. With CTEM, the focus isn’t just on identifying high-risk vulnerabilities but on validating if they are exploitable by bad actors and determining their potential impact on the business.
JupiterOne’s founder, Erkang Zheng, explains why vulnerability context matters when working across the business: “Security teams go into these sprint planning meetings with the engineering teams, and they say, ‘You need to spend 10% of your time next sprint fixing these vulnerabilities.’ But in most cases, it is difficult for the security team to make that case. Because the security team does not have the right context to bring to the business or the engineering teams to say, ‘This is why this finding matters. This is why you should spend your time on this.’ Everyone wins if security teams can bring the business context to that discussion.”
CTEM allows you to centralize vulnerability data while linking it to both internal and external assets. This way, you can see vulnerabilities in the context of their real business impact, prioritize what truly matters, and bridge the gap between your security and engineering teams. Ultimately, this lets you prioritize remediation efforts based on business impact, not just severity scores.
Prioritize with Context: Focus on Exploitability and Business Criticality
Going through the process of prioritizing vulnerabilities in your head every time you look at a list of alerts is inefficient and exhausting. With CTEM, you can automate this process. By incorporating business context into the prioritization criteria, you ensure that alerts are sorted based on exploitability, risk tolerance, and business-critical assets.
You may have millions of vulnerabilities in your environment, and even tens of thousands of them may be labeled as “critical” with a CVSS score of 9 or higher. The real challenge is knowing where to start. How do you decide which critical vulnerabilities to tackle first?
The key is to focus on exploitability. Verified exploitable vulnerabilities can dramatically reduce your list of priorities. For example, if you start with 14,000+ critical vulnerabilities and filter down to only those that are confirmed exploitable, you may reduce that number to just four. Further narrowing the list by prioritizing vulnerabilities that provide access to your business-critical assets can bring the list down to just two.
To make this prioritization process more effective, ask yourself these key questions:
- Who is responsible for fixing a vulnerability found on a specific asset?
- What is the potential blast radius if a user endpoint is compromised?
- Do any of my findings have high EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores, indicating high exploitability?
- Can an attacker use any exposure to access my critical business assets?
- Are any of these vulnerabilities actively exploitable?
Let’s take a look at one of these questions in JupiterOne…
Can an attacker somehow utilize an exposure to get to my critical assets?
FIND (Vulnerability | Finding) WITH status = 'confirmed'
THAT SOMEHOW (HAS|IS|CONNECT|USES) relates to #CriticalAsset
RETURN TREE
By focusing on these questions, you shift your team’s efforts from chasing every alert to addressing the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest threat to your most critical assets.
Create a Smarter Prioritization Process with CTEM
Manually prioritizing vulnerabilities every time you check your alerts is inefficient and exhausting. This is where Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) comes in—it allows you to pre-rank vulnerabilities based on exploitability, risk tolerance, and the criticality of affected assets.
With CTEM, you can integrate business context directly into your prioritization criteria. For instance, in JupiterOne, you can create queries that automatically search for high-risk vulnerabilities, such as public-facing code vulnerabilities in unencrypted sensitive data. These queries can be continuously monitored, with alerts configured to notify you whenever these conditions are met. You can even automate ticket creation for immediate remediation when specific vulnerabilities—like those in internet-facing code—are discovered.
Here are some examples of vulnerabilities that should be automatically prioritized:
- Vulnerable code that is actually in production
- Vulnerabilities that are related to or could expose customer data
- Vulnerable code that’s been deployed to an internet-facing workload
- Critical assets that may be unencrypted
It’s not just the vulnerabilities themselves that matter, but their context:
- Production code vulnerabilities must be patched immediately because they’re live.
- Exposing customer data represents a significant business risk that needs urgent attention.
- Internet-facing workloads are inherently more vulnerable and easier for attackers to exploit.
- Unencrypted critical assets increase the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.
By automating this process, your team can focus on fixing what’s broken without wasting time deciding what matters. You’ll ensure that your most critical vulnerabilities are always addressed first, and the gap between security and engineering teams will narrow as they work from the same prioritized, context-rich information.
Visualize Potential Impact and Asset Attack Path
Understanding the potential impact of a vulnerability isn’t just about patching the hole; it’s about knowing how a threat actor could move through your environment, potentially compromising critical assets along the way. CTEM doesn’t stop at discovery and prioritization. It also allows you to visualize and analyze the potential impact of adversary actions on your cloud infrastructure, SaaS platforms, containers, and more. By identifying and analyzing attack paths, starting with the most critical exploitable vulnerabilities, you can better understand how your crown jewels are at risk and the multiple ways in which remediation can take place.
Report, Remediate, and Automate Response Workflows
In addition to visualizing attack paths, CTEM enables continuous exposure management by providing real-time reports and alerts for critical assets exposed to vulnerabilities. With automated workflows, you can take immediate action and remediate vulnerabilities at their most vulnerable points, ensuring comprehensive security coverage.
In addition to making a clear case for why a vulnerability matters, you can save time and create alignment between your security and engineering teams by assigning patches to the right people, in the right order.
Who is already working on the project? Who wrote the vulnerable code in the first place? Which pull request introduced the vulnerability? You can ask these questions in a sprint meeting, but if you’re using JupiterOne, you can also automatically see these details associated with each finding.
CTEM + JupiterOne: Clear Priorities, Focused Remediation
To see the full potential of CTEM in action, schedule a demo of JupiterOne today. Let us show you how to combine context and automation to prioritize what matters most to your business, protect your critical assets, and focus your remediation efforts where they’ll make the biggest impact.
Interested in diving even deeper into CTEM? Download our whitepaper.
