What is continuous threat exposure management (CTEM)?
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is an approach that surfaces and actively prioritizes the biggest threats to your business. The process has five steps which are:
Scope - Define and understand your organization's attack surface, identifying all assets and their relationships.
Discover - Discovery process for detecting assets, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations continuously.
Prioritize - Focus on the exposures (threats) most likely to be exploited and have a real business impact.
Validate - Confirm the vulnerability's exploitability, analyze all attack pathways to the asset, and assess if the current response plan is enough to protect the business.
Mobilize - Respond with people, processes, or technology. Operationalize the findings by removing obstacles to approvals, implementation, and mitigation.
How is continuous threat exposure management accomplished with CAASM?
Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) with cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) is achieved through a systematic and ongoing approach to identifying, assessing, prioritizing and mitigating security risks across an organization’s attack surface. CAASM provides comprehensive visibility into all cyber assets, including devices, applications, cloud services, and user accounts. The continuous monitoring ensures that organizations have a complete and up-to-date inventory of assets, including both known and unknown assets, which is crucial for identifying potential vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.
By integrating with vulnerability management tools and threat intelligence sources, a CAASM platform enables organizations to identify vulnerabilities across their assets and prioritize them based on the level of risk they pose. This prioritization is essential for focusing efforts on the most critical exposures. CAASM can also reduce the attack surface by ensuring that all assets are configured according to security best practices, eliminating unnecessary exposures such as open ports or misconfigured firewalls.
CAASM can extend into incident response by supporting response through automated workflows and incident correlation. This allows organizations to remediate vulnerabilities or exposures more quickly, preventing similar incidents in the future. Over time, the integration of feedback from these security events into the CAASM platform supports continuous improvement in the organization’s security posture.
Through this comprehensive and integrated approach, organizations can effectively manage their threat exposure on an ongoing basis and significantly reduce the likelihood of a successful cyberattack.
