You might not be able to keep up with all the latest threats, but with the right approach, you can minimise the chances that the worst ones will succeed.
Today’s ever-evolving threat environment has turned the objective of an air-tight cybersecurity posture into a fading fantasy. AI has massively expanded the number, frequency, and sophistication of attack capabilities, and cyber criminals keep on innovating.
It’s no longer possible to completely seal off all potential attack surfaces, so that in 2025, the name of the game is proactive exposure management.
Why is exposure management important?
Every business leader wants to know that their company is safe, that every loophole is closed and every vulnerability is mitigated. But cyber teams can’t truthfully provide that assurance. New vulnerabilities keep arising, and new malicious tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) are constantly being created. The only answer is to remain agile.
Proactive, ongoing exposure management, also known as continuous threat exposure management (CTEM), enables security teams to discover threats before they become critical. This gives them more time in which to mitigate threats, lowers the chances that one will break through, and enables more efficient resolution.
CTEM also helps with prioritization so that critical risks are addressed first, and delivers valuable insights into threat data, helping to improve resource allocation and decision-making.
What is involved in CTEM?
The continuous threat exposure management framework operationalizes cyber risk mitigation in a structured, ongoing cycle. CTEM involves five stages:
Scoping, which aims to establish the potential business impact of any breach, based on key business priorities and risks.
Discovery, when assets, vulnerabilities, and potential threats are identified and analyzed. It includes threat modelling, pen testing, and other security audits.
Prioritization, where vulnerabilities are evaluated and the most critical risks are highlighted for resolution.
Validation, which verifies the level of risk for each threat and confirms that mitigation techniques will be effective.
Mobilization, a continuous process of deploying resources to address the threats and risks that have been identified, and revisiting the efficacy of the CTEM process.
Most exposure management providers utilize the CTEM framework, but there remain many different approaches to applying and implementing it. Let’s take a look at five best practices for actualizing CTEM and ensuring that your organization benefits from effective exposure management.
1. Speed up surface mapping
The only way to keep up with the rapid-fire evolution of threats is to automate as much as you can. Automated asset discovery continuously discovers and maps all your internal, external, and cloud-facing assets, so that no aspect of your attack surface goes unnoticed and every possible entry point is covered.
As exposures are revealed, they should be automatically ranked based on criticality, exploitability, and importance to business operations, so the risks that need to be addressed most urgently are prioritized.
Validation cannot be wholly automated, since human input like red or purple teaming is still needed to contextualize and assess the viability of complex attacks. Still, automated breach and attack simulation (BAS), pen testing, and continuous control validation can quickly confirm if exposures are exploitable, shortening the time to resolution.
2. Leverage threat intelligence
Integrating multiple external threat feeds brings in real-world, near-real-time information about attacker behaviors, emerging TTPs, and evolving threats.
This intel enriches your understanding of the context for specific threats that you might look out for, and helps you predict how they could affect your specific industry and infrastructure.
With the help of threat intelligence, security teams can align their own assessments of business impact with current trends in cyber attacks. This improves exposure management decision-making and helps prioritize the most relevant threats.
3. Automate and streamline threat response
Threat identification and prioritization are only the first part of exposure management. It’s vital to set up workflows for swift responses so that threats are resolved or mitigated as quickly as possible.
Best practices recommend connecting CTEM solutions with ticketing or DevSecOps systems to remove delays in fixing exposures. Automating incident response playbooks reduces the window between identification and remediation, helping to minimize the potential impact of any threat.
It’s also a good idea to build a rapid response capability, in the form of a dedicated task force that has clear authority and the relevant tools to resolve threats. This task force can act quickly once an exposure is validated, minimizing attacker dwell time.
4. Align with resilience planning
Exposure management shouldn’t stand alone. Incorporate it into business continuity planning and disaster recovery strategies, so that it’s aligned with the larger picture of business resilience.
Bringing XM thinking into business continuity planning helps ensure that the company remains operational even during active threats.
This minimizes the risk of disruption, which is a requirement for regulatory standards like DORA.
5. Establish continuous learning cycles
Finally, continuous learning is just as important for exposure management as it is for DevOps.
It’s crucial to bake in an approach that learns lessons from validated threats and resolved incidents, and uses them to update threat models and detection rules.
Basing security controls, risk management policies, and governance strategies on insights from the CTEM framework helps ensure that your protections keep up with the latest trends in cyberattacks.
Only agile exposure management can save your ecosystem
As much as we’d love to believe that we can build protections that keep every corner of the enterprise ecosystem safe, it’s just not the case. Efficient, automated, and continuous exposure management is the only way to prevent threats from turning into serious security incidents.
Read more:
Cyber attack whack-a-mole dynamics call for strategic exposure management
