What is CTEM (Continuous Threat Exposure Management)?
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a proactive cybersecurity framework that continuously identifies, validates, and prioritizes security exposures, often using methodologies like CISA’s customized SSVC decision tree to assess business impact before attackers can exploit them.
Unlike traditional security approaches that rely on periodic assessments, CTEM delivers:
Real-time visibility into threat landscapes and attack paths
Continuous monitoring of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures
Automated prioritization based on business impact and exploitability
CTEM leverages AI and machine learning to transform reactive security into a proactive, business-aligned approach, with some security teams using AI to speed up their threat management timeline by more than 50% in the first year.
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What are the benefits of implementing a CTEM strategy?
CTEM implementation delivers measurable security and business outcomes by transforming how organizations manage cyber risk.
Key business benefits:
Faster threat response: Reduce mean time to remediation from weeks to hours through automated prioritization
Proactive risk reduction: Identify and fix vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them, preventing breaches
Enhanced visibility: Gain complete attack surface visibility across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments
Regulatory compliance: Streamline compliance reporting with continuous monitoring and automated documentation
Cost optimization: Focus security resources on business-critical risks rather than managing vulnerability backlogs
Operational advantages:
Reduced alert fatigue: Eliminate noise by focusing on exploitable vulnerabilities with real business impact, which is critical when an IBM study found 68% of responders commonly respond to multiple incidents at the same time.
Improved collaboration: Bridge security and development teams with shared context and clear remediation guidance
Business alignment: Prioritize security investments based on actual business risk rather than technical severity scores
How does CTEM differ from traditional threat management approaches?
CTEM differs from traditional threat management by shifting from reactive, periodic assessments to continuous, business-aligned risk management.
Traditional vulnerability management:
Point-in-time scanning: Periodic assessments miss threats that emerge between scans
Technical severity focus: Prioritizes vulnerabilities based on CVSS scores alone
Siloed approach: Treats vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures separately
Manual processes: Requires extensive human analysis to understand business impact
CTEM approach:
Continuous monitoring: Real-time visibility into evolving threat landscapes and attack paths
Business risk prioritization: Combines technical severity with business context and exploitability
Unified risk view: Correlates vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, and network exposures
Automated remediation: Uses AI-driven insights to mobilize appropriate responses
In many ways, CTEM is an evolution of vulnerability management, or “risk based vulnerability management” (RBVM). As opposed to RBVM, Continuous Threat Exposure Management places a greater focus on real-time and ongoing monitoring, threat landscapes and attacker behavior, and the use of automation to mobilize and remediate threats.
What are the key components of a CTEM strategy?
CTEM strategy components work together to create a comprehensive, business-aligned security framework.
Core components:
Continuous monitoring
What it does: Real-time surveillance of digital assets, attack paths, and threat landscapes
Business value: Eliminates blind spots and reduces detection time from weeks to minutes
Threat intelligence integration
What it does: Incorporates external threat feeds, attacker TTPs, and emerging vulnerability data, helping to identify what CISA defines as a vulnerability under active exploitation.
Business value: Provides context for prioritizing threats based on active exploitation in the wild
Risk assessment and prioritization
What it does: Evaluates threat impact and likelihood using business context, not just technical severity
Business value: Focuses security resources on risks that could actually impact business operations
What it does: Identifies, validates, and remediates vulnerabilities across infrastructure, applications, and cloud services
Business value: Prevents security incidents by addressing exploitable weaknesses before attacks occur
Incident response capabilities
What it does: Enables rapid response to validated threats with automated workflows and clear escalation paths
Business value: Minimizes business disruption and reduces incident response costs through faster containment
How can organizations effectively implement a CTEM strategy?
Effective implementation of a CTEM strategy requires a combination of people, processes, and technology. Organizations should start by establishing clear goals and objectives for their CTEM initiative and obtaining buy-in from key stakeholders.
Next, they should conduct a thorough assessment of their existing security posture to identify areas of weakness and prioritize areas for improvement. Organizations should invest in advanced cybersecurity technologies such as threat intelligence platforms, security analytics tools, and automation solutions to support their CTEM efforts. Additionally, organizations should develop robust processes and procedures for threat detection, incident response, and risk management to ensure that their CTEM strategy is implemented effectively.
The Five Phases of CTEM
1. Scoping
The first phase of CTEM involves security teams identifying the infrastructure that needs to be analyzed and protected. In this phase, security teams should work with the business to identify the most critical assets and resources, both internal and external-facing. As part of scoping, security teams should ideally identify the correct owners of infrastructure and assets, such as code repositories, cloud infrastructure, and more.
2. Discovery
The discovery phase of CTEM is when you discover risks, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats for the assets and resources in scope. Many tools and techniques can be used in this phase to automate discovery- and ideally you can implement continuous threat and vulnerability monitoring across the entire scope environment.
3. Prioritization
The prioritization phase of a CTEM process helps organizations focus their resources and decide what to fix first, as seen in PROS' implementation where they consolidated 19 security tools and eliminated 86 critical issues within 90 days through better prioritization. Vulnerability prioritization is critical given that most companies have a backlog of vulnerabilities that is bigger than what they can address in total. Ideally, security teams have context at their fingertips that make prioritization easy, combining business logic and contextualized vulnerability data to understand the potential impact of any detected threat.
4. Validation
In the validation phase, you confirm that the vulnerability can be exploited, analyze the potential attack paths that could be carried out, and identify existing mitigation and remediation plans. This phase may consist of attack simulations, additional scans and reviews of systems, and manual analysis of vulnerabilities.
Validation is very difficult without understanding the root cause of vulnerabilities. Oftentimes, security and development teams conduct a lengthy back and forth in the validation phase to understand how to act on detected vulnerabilities. When the root cause of issues are identified, validation becomes much easier as teams know exactly what to fix in order to mitigate risk.
5. Mobilization
The mobilization is the step where security works with the business to carry out remediation and treatments for validated exposures and risks. This requires the help of product owners, developers, and other IT stakeholders who may be responsible for making the actual fixes: deploying patches, changing code, configuring resources differently, and more.
Mobilization may take the form of assistive and automated remediation actions, as demonstrated by Cribl's cloud security strategy where they automated ticket creation and team notifications through integrated workflows, depending on the risk validated and the resources in scope.
What are some common challenges associated with implementing a CTEM strategy?
While CTEM offers many benefits, organizations may encounter several challenges when implementing a CTEM strategy. These may include:
limited resources and budget constraints
complexity of integrating disparate security technologies and tools
lack of skilled cybersecurity personnel
resistance to change within the organization
To overcome these challenges, organizations should prioritize their CTEM initiatives based on their risk profile and available resources, invest in training and development programs to build cybersecurity expertise within the organization, and foster a culture of collaboration and innovation to drive successful implementation of their CTEM strategy.
Technologies that can help with CTEM
As mentioned, CTEM is a business practice and not an off-the-shelf technology you can buy. That said, there are many technologies that you should consider when building a CTEM practice.
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): ASPM platforms can help unify all vulnerabilities found across your company’s natively built applications, where exposures can be hard to discover, prioritize, and validate.
External Attack Surface Management (EASM): using an automated external attack surface management platform can help continuously identify resources that may be vulnerable and open to attackers, making the prioritization and validation stages easier.
Cloud Native Application Protection (CNAPP): if you have any cloud workloads, using a CNAPP platform will automate the discovery and prioritization of cloud vulnerabilities for continuous visibility
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM): DSPM solutions identify and monitor sensitive data exposures and potential entry points that could be exploited within an organization’s system.
Application Security Testing: AppSec scanners like software composition analysis (SCA), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and more are essential for CTEM processes like identifying application vulnerabilities and exposures.
Breach and attack simulation (BAS): breach and attack simulation platforms can help with validation by carrying out simulated attacks that mimic actual known attack tactics, techniques, and procedures
Vulnerability assessment: traditional vulnerability scanners are another essential tool for discovering vulnerabilities across different kinds of assets: from IoT and mobile devices, to workstations, servers, and more.
How can organizations measure the effectiveness of their CTEM strategy?
CTEM success measurement requires tracking both operational efficiency and business risk reduction metrics.
Operational efficiency metrics:
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): Target reduction from weeks to hours for critical exposures
Mean Time to Respond (MTTR): Measure improvement in remediation speed through automated workflows
Coverage metrics: Track percentage of attack surface under continuous monitoring.
Risk reduction metrics:
Critical exposure reduction: Measure decrease in business-critical vulnerabilities over time
Attack path elimination: Track number of potential attack paths identified and mitigated
Compliance improvement: Monitor progress toward regulatory requirements and internal security standards
Business impact metrics:
Security team productivity: Measure time saved through automated prioritization and workflows
Incident prevention: Track security incidents avoided through proactive threat exposure management
Business continuity: Monitor reduction in security-related business disruptions
Compare metrics against industry standards and establish quarterly targets for continuous improvement. Regular assessment enables organizations to demonstrate CTEM ROI and optimize their security investment strategy.
Wiz for Exposure Management: CTEM in Practice
As organizations shift from traditional vulnerability management toward truly understanding and reducing their attack surface, Wiz for Exposure Management offers a real-world embodiment of CTEM.
Unified visibility and context: Wiz brings together findings from cloud, code, and on-premises environments – via its native scanners, the Sensor Workload Scanner, and UVM (Unified Vulnerability Management) – and enriches them with business, ownership, cloud/runtime, and code context.
Prioritization based on exposure, not just CVEs: Rather than treating all vulnerabilities equally, Wiz correlates alerts, deduplicates noise, and validates external exposure (including whether vulnerabilities are exploitable in your runtime or code path). This lets teams focus first on exposures with real potential to be exploited.
Actionable remediation and accountability: Wiz doesn’t just flag risks—it assigns owners, provides AI-powered remediation guidance (root cause fixes, code suggestions, etc.), and integrates into workflows for Dev, Sec, and Infra teams to act.
Continuous improvement and governance: With posture issues, hygiene checks, and high-ROI fixes, organizations using Wiz can gradually raise their security baseline – governance, compliance, best practices—while reducing critical exposures over time.
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