The Rise of CTEM in Regulated Industries

In highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, the stakes for cybersecurity have never been higher. These sectors manage vast volumes of sensitive data, operate complex digital ecosystems, and are subject to some of the most stringent compliance requirements in the world. As digital transformation accelerates and attack surfaces expand, leaders in these industries are rethinking how they assess and manage cyber risk.

Across both banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) and healthcare, there’s a growing recognition that traditional, point-in-time security assessments no longer keep pace with the realities of today’s threat landscape.

Static reports and annual assessments don’t fully reflect how exposure evolves across cloud environments, third-party integrations, and increasingly interconnected systems. What’s needed now is a modern approach that offers:

• Continuous visibility across the attack surface,
• Risk-based prioritization of threats that matter most,
• Validation of exposures through real-world simulations, and
• Actionable insights that align directly with business and compliance priorities to support smarter, quicker decision-making.

That’s where Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) comes in. CTEM is increasingly gaining traction in regulated sectors as a practical, proactive strategy for identifying, prioritizing, and reducing the exposures that matter most before they can be exploited.

The Need for a New Security Approach in BFSI and Healthcare

Digital transformation has made a positive and tangible impact on BFSI and healthcare. However, the same innovations that benefit these sectors – cloud computing, telehealth, mobile banking, AI, and more – also expand their attack surfaces and make them vulnerable to a wide range of cyberthreats.

Moreover, healthcare and financial organizations have unique threat profiles because they are data-rich. These firms generate, process, store, and own many kinds of high-value and sensitive data, which cybercriminals aim to steal and use for numerous nefarious purposes, such as ransomware extortion, identity theft, revenge, or reputational damage. They can also sell the data on underground, illegal forums, often for staggeringly high payouts.

These sectors are also highly regulated, which means they’re subject to strict data security and privacy regulations. Many of these regulations mandate robust controls to ensure data security and individual privacy. Any compliance failures can increase the risk of data breaches and the potential for heavy financial penalties, legal issues, and loss of customer trust.

To deal with the expanding threat environment and emerging threats, these sectors need a cybersecurity strategy that allows them to:

• Continuously discover and inventory their attack surface,
• Identify and mitigate the most crucial issues based on the likelihood of compromise and potential impact,
• Effectively reduce risk, and
• Minimize business disruption

CTEM provides a way for regulated organizations to meet these goals. With CTEM, they can reconcile and address both security and compliance priorities – efficiently, cost-effectively, and at scale.

What is CTEM and Why Does it Matter in Regulated Sectors?

CTEM is a security framework that enterprises can use to continuously discover their attack surface, identify exposures, and prioritize them for effective risk reduction.

Originally conceptualized by Gartner, the goal of a CTEM program is to help organizations surface, prioritize, and mitigate the most critical threats affecting them.¹ They can achieve these objectives by following a systematic, standardized 5-step process that starts with scoping for cybersecurity exposures, moves to asset discovery, threat prioritization, and the validation of potential attacks, and ends with resource mobilization for focused, prioritized risk reduction.

Unlike static, reactive, and periodic testing methods, CTEM is dynamic, proactive, and continuous. It encourages healthcare and financial businesses to discover, prioritize, validate, and remediate the critical issues that pose true threats before they become bigger problems. By speeding up threat remediation cycles, CTEM helps regulated firms to reduce breach likelihood and avoid the costly repercussions of cyberattacks.

CTEM in BFSI and Healthcare: Powerful Security and Compliance Benefits at Scale

In an ideal world, financial and healthcare organizations would be able to identify and eliminate every risk to their data and systems. However, this is an infeasible goal and not necessarily a good use of enterprise time and resources. CTEM aims for the more realistic goal of risk reduction. It is an ongoing process that focuses on continuous validation of exposures to better prioritize mitigation based on exploitability and risk, making it a highly effective and scalable methodology to remediate critical threats and vulnerabilities and strengthen security defenses.

CTEM also supports clearer risk reporting. This improves risk visibility at both the executive and technical levels. Unified CTEM platforms integrate risk information from multiple tools and data sources. This helps regulated sectors accurately prioritize remediation actions and make defensible investment decisions to improve cyber risk management, boost cyber-resilience, and ensure preparedness for real-world threats. Also, by encouraging businesses to adopt a risk-based security approach – that regulators are increasingly expecting – CTEM enables regulated firms to minimize regulatory complexities and maintain a strong compliance posture.

How CTEM Works in a Regulated Industry Context: An Example

Here’s an example of how the CTEM process can work in the real context of regulatory industries.

Stating the obvious, banks and healthcare organizations process vast amounts of sensitive data vulnerable to breaches. The “crown jewels” in both sectors are a highly desirable target for attackers, making them subject to numerous stringent regulations that make it necessary for them to identify breach risks and mitigate the risks that are most likely to cause the maximum damage for consumer and patient protection.

Here’s how they can do this with the 5-step CTEM process:

1. Scoping: Define the assets, environments, and regulatory obligations in scope from patient data systems to payment platforms to ensure visibility across the entire digital ecosystem.
2. Discovery: Map and assess business-critical assets, dependencies, and potential vulnerabilities, building a comprehensive exposure profile for each.
3. Prioritization: Rank exposures by likelihood and business impact, considering both regulatory risk (e.g., HIPAA, PCI DSS) and operational risk.
4. Validation: Safely test and validate findings through real-world attack simulations, filtering out false positives and confirming which exposures truly matter.
5. Mobilization: Align people, processes, and technology to remediate the validated risks, while maintaining compliance and strengthening resilience.

BreachLock CTEM: A Modern, Risk-based Cybersecurity Approach for Regulated Sectors

The Unified BreachLock Platform consolidates and analyzes data from multiple threat exposure management tools from Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), Attack Surface Management (ASM), Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), and continuous pentesting and red teaming to leverage a centralized, adaptive, and actionable approach to threat exposure.

By unifying these capabilities, BreachLock eliminates silos between testing methods and provides continuous, risk-based visibility into your most critical exposures to support your CTEM program. Advanced AI-driven analytics enhance human expertise, ensuring findings are validated, prioritized, and directly mapped to business and compliance requirements.

This integrated approach enables regulated organizations in BFSI and healthcare to move beyond fragmented assessments toward a proactive CTEM strategy that strengthens resilience, simplifies regulatory alignment, and accelerates remediation where it matters most.

Discover how BreachLock CTEM can help your regulated organization maintain a proactive cybersecurity stance and stay on top of the evolving regulatory landscape. Click here to get started.

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 as a Service (PTaaS), Red Teaming, and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) solutions 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!

References

1. Gartner (2023). How to Manage Cybersecurity Threats, Not Episodes. https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/how-to-manage-cybersecurity-threats-not-episodes

Author

BreachLock Labs