Continuous Threat Exposure Management

Adopt a CTEM approach and 2x your ability to prevent attacks.
exposure-management

Preparing for CTEM

Determining which threats and vulnerabilities to prioritize is a challenge every security team faces.

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a holistic approach to cybersecurity that helps security teams focus on the exposures that will impact risk reduction most effectively. It is one of Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology trends this year.

Gartner, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024: Continuous Threat Exposure Management

Core Components of CTEM:

  • Security Validation
  • Asset and Vulnerability Insights
  • Cyber Threat Intelligence

Benefits of a Continuous Threat Exposure Management Program

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Prioritize threats most material to your business.
gain-greater-security-visibility
Gain greater security visibility.
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Break
down silos.
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Realize a more proactive approach.
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Align your security program with business goals.
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Make continuous
security improvements.

66% Fewer Breaches

Organizations prioritizing their security investments based on a continuous threat exposure management program will realize
a two-third reduction in breaches.

Implement a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Program, 2022

Gartner

Starting a CTEM Program

Get the capabilities you need to adopt a Continuous Threat Exposure Management approach.

Discover

Get a consolidated and up-to-date view of your internal and external assets and understand the risks they pose.

By integrating asset and vulnerability data, identify which assets are at risk based on their profile and whether endpoint security controls are in place to provide protection.

Validate

Consistently measure the effectiveness of your security controls with accurate attack simulations.

Understand if your prevention and detection controls are configured to provide the  coverage and visibility you need to protect your assets against the latest threats.

Prioritize

Obtain the context you need to prioritize gaps and vulnerabilities. 

By combining asset, vulnerability, and validation insights, determine which exposures pose the most significant risk and which actions will have the greatest impact on addressing them.

Optimize

Receive actionable mitigation insights to address any exposures identified, such as misconfigured network settings, policies and security controls.

Vendor-specific prevention and detection content for network and endpoint security controls empowers you to optimize your capabilities swiftly, and reduces the manual effort required.

Focus on the Exposures That Matter

Siloed approaches make it difficult to manage your threat exposure successfully.

In a single platform, Picus supplies the context you need to make better security decisions across all areas of your security program.

Security validation insights, combined with data from the threat landscape and your attack surface, enable you to focus remediation and mitigation in the areas that matter.

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Ready to learn more about
security validation?

The Importance of Security Validation

Keeping pace with the rapidly changing threat landscape is tough - there are always new threats to respond to and vulnerabilities to patch. 

By validating the effectiveness of your controls and process with attack simulation, Picus helps you understand which threats pose the greatest risk and take action to mitigate any exposures they are likely to exploit.
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Simulate Attacks to Reduce Your Threat Exposure

Discover how Picus can help you prevent twice as many threats within 3 months.
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Use Cases

Address Your Security Challenges with Validation

Enhance effectiveness across your security operations.

Breach and Attack
Simulation

Simulate attacks to measure and optimize security controls.

Pen Testing
Automation

Stay on top of exposures while alleviating manual testing requirements.

Resources

Discover Our Latest News and Content

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See the
Picus Security Validation Platform

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Submit a request and we'll share answers to your top security validation and exposure management questions.

Get Threat-ready

Simulate real-world cyber threats in minutes and see a holistic view of your security effectiveness.

Frequently Asked Questions

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is an approach to cyber security designed to help organizations obtain the context they need to prioritize exposures and manage risks more effectively.

Practically every security and IT team needs help to keep up with essential tasks such as vulnerability management. By combining data from the threat landscape and attack surface with vulnerability and security validation insights, CTEM helps organizations determine which exposures pose the greatest risk.

Garner’s CTEM definition comprises five cycle steps: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization.

A traditional approach to vulnerability management involves prioritizing common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) according to their CVSS score. A limitation of this approach, however, is that a severity score is not a rating that applies across all organizations - it can also be influenced by factors such as the number of assets affected, security controls coverage, and attack paths.

Continuous Threat Exposure Management helps overcome the limitations of traditional approaches to vulnerability management by facilitating a more holistic view and providing additional context to help security teams determine which exposures to prioritize.

Adopting a Continuous Threat Exposure management approach can require significant time and effort. To ease the process, it’s sensible to break the process into manageable steps.

Picus recommends a four-stage process: Discover, Validate, Prioritize, Optimize. By enriching security validation insights with threat intelligence, asset data, and vulnerability insights, our platform aggregates the information required to obtain a more holistic view and helps mitigate high-risk exposures swiftly and effectively.

Security validation is a core component of Continuous Threat Exposure Management because it enables security teams to quantify the effectiveness of security controls and processes.

For instance, by understanding if security controls are successfully configured to protect assets by blocking the exploitation of CVEs, security teams can obtain the additional insights they need to manage risks and prioritize the remediation of vulnerabilities.

The time it takes to adopt a Continuous Threat Management approach varies between organizations and can depend upon factors such as an organization’s existing maturity, controls, and resources. 

Adopting CTEM by integrating multiple tools, such as Threat Intelligence, Attack Surface Management, Vulnerability Scanning and Breach and Attack Simulation solutions can create additional complexity and extend the adoption period by months.

For organizations that want to speed up the adoption of CTEM, unified platforms that offer broad functionality and integrate with a wide range of controls can speed up the process significantly.