Cybersecurity professionals face immense challenges due to the constantly evolving threat landscape, sophisticated adversaries, and expanding attack surfaces. CIOs and CISOs struggle with an overwhelming number of weaknesses and hidden exposures, making it difficult to prioritize and effectively remediate risks. This lack of visibility provides ample opportunities for malicious actors to infiltrate networks. To combat these issues, Gartner recommends implementing Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM).
Continuous Threat Exposure Management Process Phases
- Scoping: During the scoping phase of CTEM, the initial identification and definition of assets are strategically aligned with business relevance from the outset.
- Discovery: Using the information collected during scoping, target discovery at the relevant assets and risk profiles for that scope, strategically aligned with business relevance from the outset.
- Prioritization: Prioritizing the treatment of exposures needs to be based on a combination of the urgency, severity, availability of compensating controls, risk appetite and level of risk posed to the organization.
- Validation: The part of the process by which an organization can validate how potential attackers can exploit an identified exposure and how monitoring and control systems might react.
- Mobilization: The objective of the mobilization effort is to ensure teams operationalize the CTEM findings by reducing friction in approval, implementation processes and mitigation deployments.