How to Build a CTEM Strategy: A Guide for Early-Stage Enterprises

Early-stage enterprises or startups, building fast and operating lean, face unique cybersecurity challenges. While their smaller size and agile structure can be an advantage, it’s a mistake to assume they’re less likely to be targeted by threat actors. In reality, attackers often see young organizations as attractive targets due to limited security infrastructure, resource constraints, and rapid growth. Cyberattacks such as malware, phishing, and social engineering don’t discriminate by company size, and a successful breach at this phase could greatly disrupt momentum or threaten long-term viability.

So, how can early-stage firms effectively identify, prioritize, and minimize cyber risks?

Old-fashioned, reactive vulnerability management (VM) is not the best solution.

For robust protection and efficient risk reduction, today’s startups need to look beyond VM. They need to explore a new cybersecurity approach known as Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM).

Why Go Beyond Vulnerability Management?

VM focuses on identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating every vulnerability. It is a reactive approach that tackles vulnerabilities as they arise and offers a fleeting sense of security to security teams. Since it can only help with the remediation of known vulnerabilities, vulnerability management alone is an inadequate security measure for the threat landscape of modern-day startups.

Here’s where CTEM can help fill the gap.

What is CTEM?

CTEM is a cybersecurity framework that defines a systematic, standardized process to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate vulnerabilities. Unlike VM, CTEM does not focus on remediating every vulnerability. Rather, a CTEM strategy provides the structure that early-stage organizations need to:

• Continuously monitor their external surfaces and threat environment,
• Assess the vulnerabilities in those surfaces,
• Prioritize the most critical risks based on an assessment of the likelihood of compromise and potential impact, and
• Implement appropriate remediation strategies – within the context of business policies – to effectively respond to threats and optimally reduce security risks.

CTEM is an integrated, holistic, and iterative program for threat and risk management, and therefore includes multiple tools. A typical CTEM toolkit for a security-aware startup may include a combination of the solutions below, sometimes combined in consolidated solutions:

• Penetration testing as a service (PTaaS) is an efficient, SaaS-delivered penetration testing solution that optimally combines human-led and automated pentesting to identify vulnerabilities and verify remediation effectiveness
• Attack Surface Management (ASM) that provides complete and persistent visibility into exposed assets and associated risks
• Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) to determine which exposures represent real business risk
• Red Teaming to test existing security controls and identify lateral movement paths
• Breach & Attack Simulation (BAS) to proactively assess and improve an organization’s security posture by simulating real-world cyberattacks

Together, these mutually reinforcing tools enable early-stage companies to continuously and cyclically assess – and reassess – their risk exposure. They can then implement strong, up-to-date measures to strengthen their security posture and minimize the window of opportunity for attackers.

How to Build a CTEM Strategy: A Step-by-step Guide for Early-stage Enterprises

Implementing a CTEM strategy can feel like an overwhelming endeavor for budget-conscious startups with limited cybersecurity resources. The step-by-step process highlighted below can help to reduce overwhelm and maximize the chances of a successful CTEM implementation.

Step 1. Scope the attack surface

The attack surface refers to all the vulnerable entry points and assets that could allow unauthorized or malicious parties to gain access to the company’s networks and systems. It’s important for early-stage enterprises to scope the attack surface because it allows them to first see what is at risk and where the risk comes from, and accordingly implement protective measures to minimize risk. It’s also important to consider which assets are the most critical to the organization during this process to help prioritize efforts accordingly later in the process.

Step 2. Implement an asset discovery process

Any IT asset can be a source of cyber-risk for startups, which is why it’s critical to develop a process for asset discovery. A standardized, repeatable process enables their security teams to easily catalog all assets in their tech stack, along with the vulnerabilities and associated risks of each asset. Furthermore, teams can use ASM tools to build a living map of the startup’s digital footprint that they can then use to ensure that the asset repository remains up-to-date.

Asset discovery should be based on the assets’ business function, criticality, risk, and potential impact because this information will guide eventual risk management and mitigation efforts.

Step 3. Identify and prioritize critical threats and vulnerabilities

With a robust CTEM strategy, early-stage companies identify and then prioritize threats and exposures. This is an effective way to reduce risk.

Ideally, this form of cybersecurity “triage” should be based on an exposure’s exploitation potential (how likely it is to be exploited) and its potential impact (how disruptive a successful exploit could be). By considering these factors, lean security teams get the business context needed to identify risks in the most high-value assets and implement appropriate remediations. This step can be accomplished with the help of a PTaaS provider that will identify vulnerabilities based on scope and discovered assets and deliver remediation guidance on the findings identified in a SaaS portal for easy management with minimal internal pentesting expertise required on the start-up’s part.

Step 4. Validate that the exposures that actually pose a risk

Startups can streamline risk remediation and ensure efficient allocation and utilization of limited resources. The key is to:

• Confirm whether a threat or vulnerability exists
• Validate how an expected attack might work
• Understand how it might impact the company’s systems
• Verify the potential exposure
• Validate the effectiveness of the existing response plan

The goal here is to reduce the volume of prioritized issues – while also maximizing protection for the business. Many PTaaS providers provide evidentiary screenshots of the vulnerabilities identified during pentesting exercises to aid with the validation process, but AEV takes it a step further, demonstrating how an attacker would pivot and move laterally in your system after successfully exploiting an initial vulnerability.

Step 5. Mobilize resources to remediate the most important threat exposures

The final step is to remediate the prioritized threats. Here’s where security teams operationalize the CTEM findings (from the previous steps) by establishing standard operating procedures, establishing a threat exposure management process, and implementing key remediation activities.

These activities must be aligned with business goals to ensure successful remediation. Additionally, the remediation team must communicate the CTEM plan to all stakeholders and clearly document cross-team approval workflows.

Optimize Your Strategy with BreachLock’s CTEM-Aligned Solutions

BreachLock’s solutions, including Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), Attack Surface Management (ASM), Red Teaming, and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), help early-stage firms streamline all these aspects and proactively manage and mitigate threat exposures. All solutions align with the CTEM framework, enabling startups to build effective, up-to-date defenses against relevant threats. Moreover, the BreachLock Unified Platform consolidates many of these tools and test findings, empowering early-stage firms to build an adaptive CTEM program and effectively safeguard their entire attack surface while maintaining lean operations.

Contact us to learn how BreachLock can support and optimize your startup’s CTEM strategy.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in offensive security, delivering scalable and continuous security testing. Trusted by global enterprises, BreachLock provides human-led and AI-powered attack surface management, penetration testing, red teaming, and adversarial exposure validation (AEV) services that help security teams stay ahead of adversaries. With a mission to make proactive security the new standard, BreachLock is shaping the future of cybersecurity through automation, data-driven intelligence, and expert-driven execution.

Know Your Risk. Contact BreachLock today!

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BreachLock Labs