Do you ever wish to have a framework that could anticipate an attack before it happens? Now, it’s a reality with Continuous threat exposure management – CTEM. Any organization willing to have proactive security in place must go for it.
But what is CTEM? How can you integrate it into your cybersecurity strategy? Find all your answers below:
What is CTEM?
In today’s complex threat environment, performing threat detection or vulnerability assessment once in a while is not enough for an organization. This is where CTEM excels with its proactive approach to continuous monitoring and risk management. CTEM is an advanced cybersecurity approach focusing on continuously monitoring and managing threats. Coined by Gartner, CTEM is a 5 stage process that includes Scoping, Discovery, Prioritization, validation, and Mobilization. The picture given below sums up these 5 stages. The objective of CTEM is to identify, assess and mitigate threats of an organization in real time.
3 Things to Know Before Integrating CTEM
Integrating CTEM into your security strategy is one of the best things you can do for your organization. However, before doing so, it’s important to know these three things.
Your Current Security Posture
Start with assessing your current security posture. You must be aware of
- the types of threats your organization is most vulnerable to
- Its potential impact
- And how common are these threats
This assessment will help you tailor your CTEM approach.
Your CTEM Goals
Ask yourself what do you want to achieve through CTEM. Do you want to
- Improve your security posture
- Reduce response time
- Enhance threat detection
Whatever it is, just be clear about your goals. This will be helpful while integrating CTEM into your security strategy.
Your CTEM Components
CTEM is not a tool but a framework. It combines three main components – Attack Surface Management(ASM), Penetration Testing, and Risk-Based Vulnerability Management(RBVM) that you must know about.
Attack Surface Management: ASM will monitor your external attack surface to identify vulnerabilities hidden within your assets.
Penetration Testing: Penetration testing helps you identify weaknesses by simulating real world attacks.
Risk Based Vulnerability Management: RBVM is the process of scanning the systems or application to find vulnerabilities and prioritize them based on their risk.
Benefits of Integrating CTEM
Improved Threat Detection: CTEM offers real-time threat detection, helping organizations find vulnerabilities early. With its continuous monitoring feature, you can identify emerging threats early on before it becomes a severe problem.
Complete Visibility: CTEM provides a complete picture of your security posture including internal and external attack surface. This visibility ensures that you can monitor and manage all the attack entry points.
Boost Threat Intelligence: CTEM often comes integrated with threat intelligence that gives up-to-date information of emerging threats. This integration boosts your ability to anticipate threats so you can be well prepared for the attacks in advance.
Continuous Improvement: CTEM establishes a feedback loop that allows you to continuously refine your security strategy. It assists in building a solid security posture by allowing you to regularly review response outcomes.
Steps to Implement CTEM in Your Cybersecurity Strategy
Discovery
The first step in implementing CTEM is discovery, where all the assets and entry points that attackers could exploit are identified. Attack Surface Management is used in this stage to discover all the assets of an organization such as physical devices, cloud resources, and software applications. This is important because you cannot protect what you don’t know. This stage offers you a complete list of your assets that helps you understand the scope of your attack surface.
Assessment
The next step is to assess the security posture of your organization. Penetration Testing plays a key role in exposing vulnerabilities in software applications such as zero-day exploitation. It identifies the weaknesses that attackers might exploit. It offers you a detailed report that highlights the vulnerabilities or potential exploits in your environment.
Prioritization
Once vulnerabilities are recognized, it’s time to fix them based on their criticality, technical exploitability, and impact on the business. A risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) approach plays a major role in this stage. RBVM allows you to identify and prioritize the risks so that you can tackle the most critical ones first. In this stage, a prioritized list is created that helps you understand which vulnerability is to be fixed first.
Remediation
The objective of this step is to effectively reduce the attack surface and address critical issues first. Here RBVM insights are used to fix vulnerabilities effectively. In this stage, specific remediation steps are taken such as patching, configuration updation, and custom scripts to fix vulnerabilities.
Monitoring
This is the last stage of CTEM implementation where Risk Based Vulnerability Management is used to continuously monitor your security environment to find emerging threats. The automated monitoring setup of RBVM continuously scans for suspicious activities and offers real-time insights that help in giving prompt response.
Final Thoughts
Threats are everywhere but with CTEM you can stay much ahead of the attackers. This could be a game changer for organizations as it prepares you to act proactively rather than being reactive to incidents. CTEM will not only help you detect and mitigate threats but also boost confidence in your organization. Now is the right time to integrate CTEM into your cyber security strategy.
Author
Shubham Jha is a Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Strobes who trades in ones and zeros for words and wit. With a solid track record, he combines technical proficiency with creative flair. Currently focused on cybersecurity, he excels at turning complex security concepts into clear, engaging narratives. His passion for technology and storytelling makes him adept at bringing intricate data to life.
