WHAT IS CTEM?
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) curriculum and framework
The Limitations of Traditional Vulnerability Management
Traditional approaches to vulnerability management were often reactive and point-in-time:
Periodic Scans: Organizations would schedule infrequent scans, leaving them blind to new threats between scans.
Patch Overload: Remediation was overwhelming, with a massive volume of vulnerabilities to fix but limited resources to tackle them all.
Missing Context: Vulnerabilities were often viewed in isolation without understanding their overall business risk or the potential attack pathways.
The Rise of CTEM
Industry leaders, particularly Gartner, recognized that the threat landscape had changed significantly, necessitating a new, more dynamic approach. Here's why:
Expanding Attack Surfaces: With the cloud, IoT, and remote work, attack surfaces were growing exponentially, making point-in-time scans ineffective.
Increased Attacker Sophistication: Attackers were becoming more adept at chaining multiple lower-risk vulnerabilities together to create critical breaches.
The Need for Prioritization: Organizations needed to prioritize the vulnerabilities that posed the most immediate and significant business risk.
The CTEM Philosophy
CTEM shifts the focus from "finding everything" to "fixing what matters most." Key aspects include:
Continuous Assessment: Instead of occasional scans, CTEM leverages automated tools and techniques for near-real-time monitoring of the external and internal attack surface.
Attacker-Centric Thinking: CTEM simulates real-world attack techniques (like those used in breach and attack simulations), emphasizing how threats could actually be exploited.
Risk-Based Prioritization: Prioritization is based not just on vulnerability severity scores but on the likelihood of exploitation and impact on the business.
Focus on Remediation: CTEM emphasizes the importance of actually fixing critical vulnerabilities to improve organizational resilience.