What is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?

Coined by Gartner in 2022, continuous threat exposure management, or CTEM is a structured framework for continuously assessing, prioritizing, validating, and remediating vulnerabilities across an organization’s attack surface, enabling you to respond effectively to the most pressing threats over an ever-expanding attack surface.

Reactive security is a temporary fix, not a sustainable solution. While proactive security is the ‘need of the hour,’ realistically, your organization can neither fix everything nor be 100% sure which vulnerabilities can safely be postponed for remediation.

Moreover, with cyber attackers pivoting at breakneck speeds, it leaves you scrambling to automate controls and deploy patches without reducing future exposure. So, what does effective proactive security look like?

Gartner predicts that organizations adopting CTEM programs will reduce security breaches by two-thirds by 2026. This statistic underscores the transformative power of CTEM, but let’s take a deeper look.

Why Continuous Threat Exposure Management?

The primary challenge driving IT specialists and companies away from traditional vulnerability management programs is the overwhelming laundry list of vulnerabilities generated by annual or quarterly scans and pentests.

These vulnerabilities are typically categorized based on the tools used and the environments they affect. While categorization generally helps make complex problems more manageable, the current approach fails to aggregate or contextualize CVEs based on actual risk – the likelihood of exploitation – or their potential impact on a company’s KPAs.

Thus, most IT teams waste time addressing exposures that don’t matter—or they simply give up. This inefficiency leads to operational fatigue for both IT groups and business leaders, eventually causing analysis paralysis, i.e., leaving you vulnerable, as attackers exploit the technical debt that remains unaddressed.

Compounding the issue, most teams lack the tools to correlate their progress in fixing vulnerabilities to overall risk reduction or struggle to demonstrate how their efforts translate into meaningful improvements in security posture, especially in a business context.

CTEM framework addresses these challenges by continuously monitoring attack surfaces and collecting data 24/7 for historical analysis. Building on the risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) principle, it provides a flexible framework that adapts to each organization’s specific needs while maintaining a proactive approach to improving resilience.

What are the 5 Pillars of CTEM?

1. Scoping

It begins with identifying critical assets and attack surfaces, focusing on areas most vital to the organization to study each asset’s business impact with cross-department collaborations; companies align security efforts with strategic goals and ensure resources are allocated efficiently. Some key considerations include:

• Identifying critical business assets and systems.
• Mapping potential attack surfaces.
• Engaging stakeholders across departments to ensure alignment.
• Updating the scope to reflect changes in business processes or technology.

2. Discovery

This pillar encourages analysis of various risk types across your organization’s attack surface to comprehensively understand your security posture and uncover hidden exposures while building a foundation for prioritizing and addressing these risks effectively. Some common threats include :

• Traditional vulnerabilities, such as unpatched software or weak configurations.
• Active Directory risks, which can compromise identity and access control.
• Identity management issues, including weak credentials or excessive permissions.
• Configuration vulnerabilities, like misconfigured servers or applications.
• Cloud security gaps stem from poor access policies or mismanaged resources.

3. Prioritization

Once exposures are identified, prioritization aims to target the most critical threats. A risk-based assessment aligns efforts with potential impact, analyzing attack paths to vital assets where business impact ensures prioritization matches strategic objectives. This focused approach mitigates the highest risks first.

Some crucial prioritization factors include:

• Mapping vulnerabilities to critical business operations.
• Assessing how each exposure could be exploited.
• Prioritizing risks that have the highest likelihood and impact.
• Developing actionable remediation strategies to ensure swift mitigation.

4. Validation

This pillar ensures effective security measures by testing controls, identifying gaps, and confirming that remediation efforts address the right risks through pentests, red-team exercises, and verifying attack paths to neutralize threats. Moreover, continuous monitoring and incident response testing help maintain resilience.

5. Mobilization

Successful remediation requires cross-team coordination and clear communication of responsibilities. Your company can efficiently address vulnerabilities and reduce risk by mobilizing the necessary teams, tracking improvement metrics, and regularly reporting on risk reduction progress to offer visibility into the effectiveness of CTEM security efforts.

How to Draft an Effective CTEM Strategy?

Building an effective CTEM strategy means incorporating regular penetration testing to find vulnerabilities early and stay ahead of evolving threats, keeping your defenses strong and ready.  – Jinson Varghese, Information Security Lead at Astra

Automate for Early Detection

Start by integrating continuous vulnerability scanning into your security strategy from the ground up. In fact, automate scanning to ensure it’s always running and can cover your entire attack surface, including cloud environments and third-party integrations, which are often overlooked. Catch CVEs in their early stages, enabling you to respond faster.

Focus on What Matters Most

Focus your resources on what matters most by leveraging risk-based prioritization. Build a system that factors in your organization’s risk tolerance and key asset dependencies to determine which threats need immediate attention. Prioritize based on potential impact, exploitability, and business context—look for vulnerabilities that expose critical assets or could lead to a chain of attacks.

Manage Threats, not Incidents

Leverage threat intelligence to stay proactive, not reactive. Gather data from multiple sources, including external threat feeds, industry reports, and your internal alerts, to better anticipate emerging threats and inform your vulnerability management process, improving the accuracy of prioritization. 

Pro tip: Enrich your continuous threat exposure management with indicators of compromise (IOCs) to gain a clearer picture of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) being used by adversaries targeting your environment.

Scale Your Security

Implement response automation like patching, alerts, or firewall updates to reduce human error and improve your response time to threats. Use orchestration platforms to create workflows that automatically remediate known vulnerabilities based on predefined conditions, allowing your team to scale and manage incidents without being overwhelmed.

The Transition to CTEM

That said, transitioning to a continuous threat and exposure management program comes with its challenges. A common issue is the presence of silos within security teams—vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and incident response often operate independently, leading to missed opportunities for collaboration. 

Additionally, some skill gaps in managing and operating CTEM platforms and processes can trigger resistance to change in teams accustomed to traditional methods, slowing adoption and hindering the program’s success.

To overcome these hurdles, you must foster a culture of collaboration across teams, breaking down silos through integrated tools and clear communication channels. Investing in automation is critical for streamlining processes and ensuring comprehensive visibility. To address skill gaps offering training programs, certifications, and workshops can help reduce resistance. 

Lastly, a phased rollout and clear communication of continuous threat exposure management’s benefits—such as improved security and reduced risk—can ensure smoother implementation and long-term success.

CTEM Security vs. Traditional Approaches

Feature	CTEM	Vulnerability Scanning	RBVM	Pentesting
Focus	Continuous risk assessment and prioritization	Identification of vulnerabilities	Risk-based prioritization and remediation	Manual identification and exploitation of vulnerabilities
Scope	Broad, encompassing various risk types (e.g., vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity risks)	Specific to software and system vulnerabilities	Broad, focusing on risk-based prioritization of vulnerabilities	Targeted, focusing on specific attack vectors or systems
Methodology	Continuous monitoring, threat intelligence, and risk assessment	Automated scanning of systems and applications	Risk-based prioritization of vulnerabilities, often using CVSS scoring	Manual and automated techniques to simulate attacks
Output	Prioritized list of risks, remediation recommendations, and actionable insights	List of vulnerabilities and their severity	Prioritized list of vulnerabilities for remediation	Detailed report of vulnerabilities, attack paths, and exploitation techniques
Frequency	Continuous	Periodic (daily, weekly, monthly)	Continuous or periodic	Periodic (annual, biannual, or as needed)
Automation	High	High	Medium	Low to medium
Team Involvement	Security operations, IT operations, development, and business	Security operations and IT operations	Security operations and IT operations	Security operations and penetration testing teams
Complexity	High (requires integration with various security tools and processes)	Medium	Medium	High (requires skilled professionals and specialized tools)
Risk Reduction	Proactive, focused, and continuous	Reactive and limited	Proactive and focused	Proactive and targeted

How can Astra Help?

As a unique PTaaS platform designed for CTEM, Astra’s unique blend of automation, AI, and human expertise offers a seamless, continuous approach to vulnerability management. With 10,000+ security tests, seamless integrations, and round-the-clock expert support, Astra simplifies vulnerability management, making it more effective and hassle-free.

Moreover, our OrbitX initiative takes it a step further, giving CTOs the superpower they deserve by enabling them to shift left at scale with continuous pentests, providing a 360° view of your security posture, and leveraging AI-first defensive strategies for proactive protection.

In fact, last year alone, we helped uncover over 2 million vulnerabilities, saving customers more than $69M in potential losses. 

Why Astra is Your Go-To for CTEM?

Still unsure? Hear from the 700+ global companies who trust Astra to protect their most critical assets. Let Astra be the foundation for your continuous threat exposure management.

Final Thoughts

CTEM isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a paradigm shift in cybersecurity. Continuously assessing, prioritizing, and addressing vulnerabilities based on real-world risk transforms traditional vulnerability management into an agile, effective approach to security, empowering you to align your cybersecurity efforts with business priorities and mitigating critical threats without succumbing to operational fatigue.

Most importantly, the structured approach reduces risk and fosters resilience through data-driven insights, cross-department collaboration, and continuous monitoring.

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