CTEM Implementation Guide: Building a Continuous Threat Exposure Management Program

Most security teams are all too familiar with today’s reality of non-stop alerts, expanding attack surfaces, and growing remediation queues. Yet the real challenge isn’t the volume of vulnerabilities, but determining which ones have a high exploitation likelihood and/or business impact potential to warrant quick action and resource allocation.

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is designed to solve this exact problem. Rather than tackling every weakness, the CTEM framework is designed to enable organizations to continuously discover, validate, and prioritize exposures based on real-world risk and business impact. It pushes the boundaries of proactive security, outlining how to build a sustainable, proactive approach that aligns security actions with business risk.

This implementation guide will show you how to implement a CTEM program in your organization step-by-step.

How to Set Up a CTEM Program: A Systematic 5-Step Approach

This systematic 5-step approach will help you to set up an effective CTEM program that helps you to identify and remediate the most serious exposures, thus ensuring a more resilient security posture for your organization.

#1. Scope for cybersecurity threats

In this first stage, your security team will identify the organization’s attack surface, carefully including all vulnerable entry points and assets that could open the door to a host of cyberattacks. It’s crucial to scope out both the internal and external attack surfaces to ensure that threats and vulnerabilities arising from inside the organization, as well as all the digital assets that an external attacker could access via the public internet, are accounted for. Attack surface management tools typically include asset inventorying and classification capabilities to make this process easier to complete, which is especially necessary in large, complex environments.

Best practices:

When scoping the attack surface:

• Do not stop at traditional devices and applications.
• Also consider less tangible elements like corporate social media accounts and online code repositories as potential attack vectors.
• Understand the risks posed by SaaS tools and the data being stored in them.

#2. Discover assets and build a risk profile for each asset

The second step is to identify and inventory your business assets and assess their vulnerabilities and associated risks. These details should then be added to your asset repository. To strengthen CTEM, it’s crucial to find and document both visible and hidden assets in the repository.

An up-to-date asset repository with the risk profile of every asset provides visibility into your attack surface. This visibility is vital to proactively manage exposures and threats – and ensure that there are no security gaps for attackers to exploit.

Best practices:

Develop a standardized asset discovery process that can help you:

• Continuously monitor changes to the IT infrastructure
• Discover new or modified assets
• Identify their vulnerabilities and risks
• Add them to the asset repository

An attack surface management (ASM) tool is excellent for scaling this process with automated asset discovery and scanning.

#3. Prioritize threats by urgency, security, and risk level

Step 3 of the CTEM process is to prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities that pose the highest risks to the organization’s systems and business continuity for remediation. Vulnerability prioritization is essential to avoid wasting resources on fixing non-critical vulnerabilities and threats, and often one of the most challenging components of CTEM without the proper processes, tools, or solutions.

So how can you prioritize vulnerabilities?

This can be done by using key metrics like CVSS score and contextualizing each risk with exploitability, business risk, and likelihood of exploitation. Penetration testing, often utilized at this stage of the CTEM lifecycle, typically takes these factors into consideration when reporting vulnerability findings. You can also consider these factors to support your prioritization efforts:

• High-value business assets: Is the vulnerability present in a high-value/business-critical asset?
• Compensating controls: Do you already have controls in place to remediate a discovered vulnerability?
• Remediation feasibility: How much time and effort are likely to be needed to remediate a threat exposure?
• Potential for business disruption: Is remediation likely to disrupt operations or cause other problems?

Asking yourself these questions can help to clarify a vulnerability’s exploitation probability and the potential impact of successful exploitation. Based on this clarity, you can then develop a treatment plan to address the most critical, high-priority security issues.

Best practices:

• When prioritizing exposures, consider both mission-critical systems and significant security events.
• Leverage methods like impact analysis, security posture analysis, and vulnerability risk stratification to create the priority list and accordingly select appropriate security measures.
• If using a third-party penetration testing service, gain a clear understanding of how they prioritize vulnerabilities before choosing a vendor to ensure that their capabilities and prioritization metrics align with your business goals.

Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) combines security testing automation with valuable human expertise to accelerate and scale the process of risk identification, assessment, prioritization, and remediation. Some PTaaS providers also leverage AI to accelerate reporting and provide deeper contextual insights around risk scoring for more accurate risk prioritization.

#4. Test and validate vulnerabilities with real-world attack simulations

In this step, you will validate the exploitability of vulnerabilities and aim to gain an understanding of how a real-world attack might work. Here, security teams will analyze potential attack pathways to each asset and assess systems’ responses to understand where defenses pass and where they fail. Validation is the step where theoretical risk becomes proven risk, warranting immediate action.

Best practices:

• Conduct red teaming exercises regularly, where ethical hackers simulate a real-world attack on your systems from reconnaissance to establishing a foothold and performing lateral movement, and report back to you about where your defenses pass and fail, thereby validating risks.
• Use an advanced autonomous red teaming tool like Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) to validate and visualize how real attacks might work and how vulnerable systems might react. This is a good option for organizations wanting to scale red teaming coverage without increasing internal headcount.

#5. Mobilize resources for vulnerability remediation and exposure management

In this final CTEM stage, you will mobilize resources to remediate identified vulnerabilities and threat exposures. Make sure to establish and document clear Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). SOPs are vital for CTEM because they provide a consistent and repeatable structure for applying security measures as threats evolve. They also:

• Clarify CTEM roles and responsibilities, and increase accountability
• Accelerate incident response
• Ease compliance burdens and reduce the risks of non-compliance

Best practices

• Establish a threat exposure management process that balances automation with human expertise.
• Align remediation activities with business goals to help you surface and actively prioritize the exposures that most threaten your business.
• Communicate your CTEM plan to all relevant stakeholders to ensure that there are no delays in receiving stakeholder approvals.

Build an Effective, Robust CTEM Program with BreachLock CTEM

Build and strengthen your CTEM program with BreachLock’s comprehensive suite of CTEM-aligned solutions. The BreachLock Unified Platform effortlessly consolidates and analyzes data from multiple threat exposure management tools and data sources, including vulnerability management, Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), PTaaS, ASM, and continuous pentesting, to enable a centralized, adaptive, and actionable approach to threat exposure management.

Discover how BreachLock’s CTEM-aligned solutions and integrated platform can strengthen your security posture and optimize your security ROI. Click here to get started.

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BreachLock Labs