Embracing Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

Are You Continuous?

In today’s dynamic cybersecurity landscape, the mantra “continuous threat exposure management” (CTEM) has gained significant momentum. As organizations grapple with evolving threats and vulnerabilities, CTEM offers a framework to proactively identify, prioritize, and remediate risks. In this blog post, we’ll explore the key steps that managed security service providers (MSSPs) and enterprises can take to successfully implement CTEM and enhance their security posture.

Understanding CTEM

CTEM is not a product or a single technology but rather a strategic approach that combines threat intelligence, exposure management, assessment, validation, and prioritization to continuously improve security. Unlike traditional security practices that often focus on reactive measures, CTEM emphasizes a proactive and risk-based approach. According to Gartner, there are 5 key phases of the CTEM lifecycle: scoping, discovery, prioritizing, validation, and mobilization. In order to successfully operationalize CTEM, enterprises and their MSSP partners must take the following actions to build ongoing assessment, prioritization, and mitigation:

Key Steps for CTEM Implementation

1. Define Your Goals and Objectives: Clearly articulate your organization’s specific security goals and objectives.This will help you align your CTEM efforts with your overall business strategy.
2. Assess Your Current Security Posture: Conduct a comprehensive assessment of your existing security infrastructure, processes, and capabilities. This will identify areas that need improvement and provide a baseline for measuring progress.
3. Implement Threat Intelligence: Integrate threat intelligence feeds from reputable sources to stay informed about emerging threats and vulnerabilities. This will enable you to proactively address potential risks.
4. Prioritize Risks Based on Business Impact: Evaluate the potential impact of different threats and vulnerabilities on your business operations. This will help you focus your resources on the most critical risks.
5. Leverage Automation: Automate repetitive tasks, such as vulnerability scanning and patch management, to improve efficiency and reduce the risk of human error.
6. Continuously Monitor and Validate: Implement ongoing monitoring and validation processes to ensure that your security controls are effective and up-to-date.
7. Foster Collaboration and Communication: Encourage collaboration between security teams, IT departments, and business units to ensure that everyone is aligned on security goals and priorities.

The Role of an Exposure Assessment Platform

A unified exposure assessment platform that ingests and prioritizes data from vulnerability management, Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM), and adversarial exposure validation technologies such as Penesting as a Service (PTaaS) and Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), offers a powerful solution for organizations seeking to enhance their security posture, reduce risk, and improve compliance. Not only do exposure assessment platforms help enhance return on investment from these technologies, they help organizations automate workflows, ensure collaboration, and measure improvements in security posture.

The Emergence of AI Assistants in Exposure Assessment Platforms

AI assistants play a crucial role in optimizing security workflows, data management, prioritization and reporting. By automating routine tasks and providing intelligent recommendations, AI can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your exposure assessment efforts.

Some examples of how AI will be applied to key proactive security challenges include:

• Automated Threat Prioritization: AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify the most critical threats and vulnerabilities.
• Intelligent Remediation Recommendations: AI can suggest optimal remediation strategies based on vulnerability characteristics and your organization’s specific needs.
• Automated Reporting: AI can generate customized reports that provide actionable insights into your organization’s security posture.

PlexTrac:  Automating the CTEM Lifecycle

PlexTrac’s Role in CTEM Orchestration

PlexTrac delivers an exposure assessment platform that enables managed service providers and enterprises to create a data intelligence layer by harnessing to prioritize remediation, dynamically optimize security workflows and reporting, and quantify business impact of proactive security.  

PlexTrac’s platform automates the continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) lifecycle by:

• Creating a comprehensive data intelligence layer from exposure assessment data sources such as pentest tools, vulnerability scanners, and attack surface management platforms
• Streamlining reporting and prioritizing remediation
• Delivering offensive security workflow automations to enhance collaboration
• Accelerating mean-time-to-remediation and demonstrating offensive security ROI 
• Preventing risk recurrence by triggering re-testing and validation   

PlexTrac is a versatile exposure assessment platform that aligns with the CTEM framework, offering comprehensive solutions for threat exposure management. Let’s explore how PlexTrac delivers on each phase of the CTEM lifecycle:

1. Scoping and Assessment

• Comprehensive Assessments: PlexTrac’s assessment modules provide a deep dive into your organization’s security posture, identifying vulnerabilities and risks.
• Flexible Scheduling: The scheduler ensures regular assessments are conducted, keeping your security posture up-to-date.

2. Discovery and Prioritization

• Detailed Findings: PlexTrac’s discovery capabilities uncover vulnerabilities and their associated assets, providing a clear picture of your exposure.
• Contextual Scoring: The prioritization module uses contextual scoring to rank vulnerabilities based on their potential business impact, ensuring that critical risks are addressed first.
• Remediation Integrations: PlexTrac seamlessly integrates with popular ticketing systems like ServiceNow and Jira, streamlining the remediation process.

3. Validation

• Test and Retest Planning: PlexTrac can jumpstart initial validation and retest cycles to support continuous validation by ensuring  the effectiveness of remediation efforts.

4. Mobilization

• Remediation Workflow: PlexTrac’s automated remediation workflow guides teams through the process of addressing vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of human error.
• AI Recommendations: Leveraging AI, PlexTrac can provide intelligent recommendations for remediation strategies, optimizing efficiency and effectiveness.

The Power of a Unified Platform

Traditional exposure assessment approaches often involve multiple, disparate tools, making it difficult to gain a cohesive view of your organization’s vulnerabilities. PlexTrac simplifies this process by providing a unified platform that brings together key capabilities:

• Data Ingestion: PlexTrac seamlessly integrates with vulnerability and exposure assessment, adversarial exposure validation platforms, and Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) platforms, allowing customers to ingest and analyze data from multiple sources. This provides a comprehensive picture of your attack surface.
• Prioritized Remediation: PlexTrac’s prioritization engine evaluates the potential business impact of each vulnerability, helping organizations focus resources on the most critical threats and track the remediation process to ensure successful mitigation.
• AI-Powered Reporting: PlexTrac leverages AI assistants to optimize security workflows and reporting, further enhancing its effectiveness.
• Enhanced Visibility: PlexTrac provides a clear and comprehensive view of your organization’s security posture, enabling you to measure progress over time.
• Improved Efficiency: By normalizing proactive security data in a single platform, streamlining reporting and delivering priorities findings to ticketing systems, PlexTrac automates exposure assessment process, saving valuable time and resources.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: PlexTrac’s intelligent prioritization engine helps you make informed decisions about which vulnerabilities to address first, ensuring that your resources are allocated effectively.
• Flexibility and Scalability: PlexTrac is designed to scale with your organization’s needs, providing a flexible and adaptable solution for enterprises and service providers  of all sizes.

Conclusion

CTEM offers a powerful framework for proactively managing cybersecurity risk and staying ahead of the threat. PlexTrac offers a powerful and efficient solution for ongoing exposure assessment and CTEM lifecycle orchestration. By leveraging PlexTrac and the power of AI, proactive security teams can gain valuable insights into their risk posture, identify and remediate critical vulnerabilities based on business impact, and strengthen their organization’s overall security posture.

Interested in seeing if PlexTrac is the right CTEM vendor for you? Request a demo, today.