Do we need a new cybersecurity framework? According to Gartner, the answer is yes. Since 2022, they have championed CTEM, a five-stage approach designed to shrink attack surfaces and minimize cyber threat exposure through continuous risk assessment and mitigation. At its core, CTEM advocates for regularly testing your defenses to find vulnerabilities in your system and fortify your organization’s security with risk mitigation strategies.
What makes CTEM new – and interesting? The fundamental shift lies in its departure from reactive approaches focused on addressing past incidents. Instead, CTEM establishes a proactive cybersecurity framework rooted in ongoing risk management. This forward-looking strategy aims to anticipate and thwart future attacks, rather than merely reacting to previous breaches.
What if you could proactively identify and mitigate these risks before they become breaches? This proactive stance defines continuous threat exposure management (CTEM).
CTEM isn’t just a one-off project. Rather, it is an ongoing process, or in traditional IT terms, a program. It continuously tests your own cybersecurity and lets you stay ahead of attackers instead of waiting to respond after an incident.
What is CTEM? The 5 phases in action
CTEM is a proactive cybersecurity approach that enables you to continuously assess your business’s entire digital infrastructure – networks, systems, assets, everything – to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. By regularly simulating data breaches, CTEM helps reduce exposure to threats and strengthen your defenses. Since no organization can safeguard against all security incidents, the idea behind CTEM is to handle risk exposure by reducing the attack surface.
CTEM works by helping you identify weak spots, map them to attack vectors, prioritize them according to risk to critical data, take remediation actions and track their effectiveness.
The heart of CTEM lies in its adaptability. It constantly learns and improves, using data from the assessment, mitigation and remediation processes, enabling you to make informed decisions regarding threat exposure management.
The CTEM program consists of the following five stages:
CTEM stage 1: Scoping
The first step is to define your network’s attack surface, which includes defining the boundaries and priorities of your system. This process involves identifying all entry points and the most sensitive data and infrastructure of your business.
Based on these critical assets, you must define the program scope, which includes the systems, networks, applications and data that must be assessed for vulnerabilities. In addition to traditional assets, you must consider including your organization’s social handles, sensitive data stored in third-party systems and your employees’ personal devices.
CTEM stage 2: Discovery
During this stage, you must thoroughly list and evaluate the assets identified in the scoping stage to find potential exposures. You can start by creating a detailed inventory of all visible and hidden assets within the defined scope, such as hardware, software, applications, data stores and cloud resources. It must also include IAM assets like identities and their access rights.
Further, you must scan each of these assets for vulnerabilities like obsolescence, misconfigurations, orphaned accounts and weak passwords. Each asset should be assessed and scored based on its likelihood of being compromised and its impact to determine the overall risk exposure.
Important to note: Most organizations fumble when differentiating scoping and discovery. The key difference between them is that scoping defines what assets and systems to include, while discovery focuses on how these assets could be compromised. Scoping only sets the boundaries of CTEM, whereas discovery provides a detailed asset evaluation to identify and mitigate risks.
CTEM stage 3: Prioritization
This stage involves prioritizing high-value and high-risk business assets to plan an effective cybersecurity strategy. Ranking is crucial as it’s highly challenging to fix all the weaknesses in constantly changing network environments.
You must rank the assets based on threat urgency, risk level and tolerance, and compensating controls deployed. Evaluate traditional vulnerabilities, identity issues, and misconfigurations, mapping each exposure to potential attack paths leading to critical assets. This allows you to prioritize high-risk identities first and focus on strengthening their access controls, enabling the optimization of resource allocation.
CTEM stage 4: Validation
In this stage, you must check your existing security’s effectiveness against the risks prioritized in the previous stage. Perform the following steps to assess and validate your security posture:
- Initially, verify if the vulnerabilities are exploitable.
- Simulate attacks to test each attack path that leads to a critical asset.
- Validate the existing response strategy to be quick and effective in risk mitigation.
It’s crucial to ensure that all parties – IT personnel, security teams and key executives – agree upon the most critical risk exposures for which mitigation is required.
CTEM stage 5: Mobilization
The last CTEM stage requires you to adequately educate your entire security team regarding the program’s objectives and remediation plan. Gartner advises not to remain completely dependent on automated tools. Instead, you must ensure stakeholder cooperation to make the program successful.
It’s also the responsibility of the organization to avoid burdening security teams with cross-department approval delays and ensure the smooth execution of the CTEM program by mobilizing sufficient resources.
IAM: The cybersecurity foundation
IAM is at the core of your organization’s security as it ensures that the right people get access to the right resources at the right time to perform their jobs while preventing unauthorized access. This unique role makes IAM the ideal starting point for executing a sweeping CTEM strategy.
IAM allows you to define a set of rules and policies to manage your employees’ identities and control resource access. IAM is central to your enterprise security in that it enforces appropriate authentication techniques like 2FA/MFA, and authorization techniques like the POLP (principle of least privilege), Zero Trust Policy and RBAC (role-based access control), to name a few. However, as today’s hybrid networks grow in complexity, you must ensure that your IAM practices are equally sophisticated and adaptable. Weak or outdated IAM strategies can easily create vulnerabilities that can be exploited in cyberattacks.
For instance, per Verizon’s 2024 DBIR, 31 percent of all breaches in the past decade used stolen credentials, while the human element (errors and social engineering attacks) caused 68 percent of breaches in 2023. The report also found that exploiting vulnerabilities for cyberattacks tripled from the last year. These numbers point to critical IAM gaps, demanding stronger security protocols.
Here’s how weak IAM strategies may leave your business vulnerable to cyberattacks:
- Weak or stolen credentials: According to the latest Verizon DBIR, this tactic remains the favorite of attackers, accounting for the most data breaches in 2023 (about 40 percent). The lack of strong password policies, multi-factor authentication, and user education are the top weaknesses that attackers exploit to steal credentials and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.
- Privilege escalation: Another common IAM weakness is when inadequate controls on user permissions enable an attacker or a malicious insider to acquire greater privileges than authorized. For instance, a malicious actor can abuse their existing privileges or a system vulnerability to elevate their permissions to that of an administrator, allowing them access to sensitive resources and significantly increasing breach possibilities.
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Obsolete or misconfigured IAM tools: Most organizations today use several IAM tools, such as identity providers, SSO, PAM, IGA, MFA and CIEM. While these tools provide excellent security, a single mistake in configuring them may expose your entire network to attackers. Common misconfigurations include over-granting permissions, poor MFA settings, inadequate access control and reviews, unmanaged identities and weak session management.
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Poor visibility and governance: Insufficient visibility and governance over IAM practices may result in security incidents such as identity thefts and data breaches going unnoticed. Moreover, poor IAM practices may also result in non-compliance with industry standards like HIPAA and GDPR, ultimately causing organizations severe financial and reputational losses.
Key IAM practices enhanced by CTEM
An effective CTEM implementation helps you leverage better IAM practices to reinforce your organization’s security posture in several ways:
Least privilege
With CTEM’s access pattern analysis, you can detect excessive permissions and unused privileges provided to users. It allows you to refine access policies and remove unnecessary permissions, enabling you to enforce the least privilege principle more effectively.
Zero trust
CTEM aids you in implementing strict authentication policies by regularly verifying all users and devices, even within the network. Constantly assessing identity and access anomalies helps you maintain a “never trust, always verify” approach.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Through CTEM, you can identify high-risk entry points and accounts that could be exploited due to MFA’s absence. With this information, you can strategically use MFA when and where it’s most needed.
Privileged access management (PAM)
CTEM also asks to monitor privileged accounts, which are the top targets for attackers. By identifying vulnerabilities in privileged access, you can implement stricter control and continuous monitoring to reduce the risk of a breach.
Conclusion
Gartner estimates that by 2026, businesses that incorporate a robust CTEM program into their cybersecurity practices will be able to cut the likelihood of a breach by 66 percent.
Focusing on tackling exposures rather than events is the best way for your organization to obtain a strong security posture for your critical assets. Setting up IAM with static rules and policies and waiting for a security incident can hurt your organization’s financial and reputational standing, at times beyond recovery.
IAM is a dynamic process requiring continuous monitoring and refinement, which the CTEM program can readily provide. Its structured 5-stage framework for finding and managing vulnerabilities allows you to enhance your IAM practices and align them with the ever-changing hybrid environments and an equally evolving threat landscape.
Now is the time to explore CTEM benefits and learn more about its potential to fortify your digital kingdom’s security.
