Better Together: CTEM Vendors That Play Nice—and Win Big—Together

Exploring NodeZero, Pentera, and PlexTrac for next-gen threat management.

Let’s be honest, the cybersecurity tools in your belt keep growing. Then again, so do the cyber threats. How do you find the best tools for your organization and ensure they keep your threat levels at an all-time low and your security posture at your all-time high?

Continuous testing, validation, and monitoring are key in stopping attackers in their tracks. Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a proactive cybersecurity practice that helps identify, prioritize, and remediate risks so that organizations can manage their security gaps and adapt in real time to protect their digital assets and infrastructure.

Together in this blog, we’ll quickly review what CTEM is, why it’s important, how PlexTrac assists you with CTEM, and complementary CTEM vendors to leverage alongside PlexTrac. 

What Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?

As quickly mentioned, CTEM is a methodical, ongoing approach to identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and mitigating cyber risks across your organization.   Unlike vulnerability management which often relies on point-in-time scans, CTEM is an always-on approach with continuous assessment of an organization’s security posture. 

According to Gartner, the CTEM lifecycle consists of five key phases:

1. Scoping

The main focus in the scoping phase is to organize all your assets to gain a full view of your attack surface and determine the scope, including applications, software, hardware, mobile devices, social media accounts, code repositories, and supply chain systems.

2. Discovery

In this phase, you’ll focus on discovering any potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations,

risks, or unmanaged assets. 

3. Prioritization

It’s practically impossible to address every security as new threats continue to pop up. In this stage of the CTEM lifecycle, you’ll want to prioritize risks based on urgency, security risks, asset value, and the potential impact of an exploited attack path. 

4. Validation

For this stage, it’s important to validate how attackers could exploit your vulnerabilities and analyze security gaps which could be proven through pentesting. Then continuously validate and test if your current response plans will effectively defend your company and its clients. 

Mobilization

Here you will focus on remediation efforts. You’ll do so by communicating your CTEM plan to stakeholders and leveraging automation as well as manual efforts to address and reduce risks.

This iterative process enables organizations to continually enhance their security posture and react swiftly to new threats as they arise — positioning CTEM as a proactive and contemporary strategy for cybersecurity management.

How to Evaluate CTEM Vendors

With a growing number of continuous threat exposure management vendors, choosing the right one comes down to your unique environment and risk profile. When evaluating a CTEM vendor, consider its breadth as well as its integration capabilities with your existing tools, the types of automation, and ease of use.

The ideal CTEM vendor will not only provide the technology you need but also enable you to ensure optimal security exposure management.

A Strategic Shift to CTEM

From reacting to alerts to actively managing exposure in real time, CTEM tools help you continuously simulate attacks and prioritize risks. Choosing the right CTEM vendor that aligns with your security infrastructure will help improve operational efficiency and provide a better understanding of your security posture.

Enhance CTEM With PlexTrac

If you’re looking to amplify your security efforts and proactively manage exposure risk, consider PlexTrac™ for CTEM. You’ll be able to easily consolidate security data from various tools and manual tests, automatically prioritize risks based on business impact, and automate remediation and retesting workflows for ongoing, effective threat management.

Learn how PlexTrac helps security teams like yours embrace CTEM in our latest ebook or skip straight to a demo today to see PlexTrac in action. 

Complimentary CTEM Vendors to Consider

PlexTrac ingests data from your scanner tools or manual pentests but we do not assist with the penetration testing. Automated pentesting tools like Pentera or NodeZero by Horizon3.ai are the perfect complement to PlexTrac™ for CTEM. 

1. Pentera: Automated Security Validation

Pentera specializes in automated security validation, a core component of the CTEM framework. Its platform continuously assesses an organization’s internal, external, and cloud-based attack surface by emulating real-world attack scenarios. This proactive approach helps organizations identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and credential exposures before malicious actors can exploit them. 

Pentera features include:​

• Continuous attack surface assessment with ongoing monitoring of the entire IT environment to detect potential entry points.
• Exposure validation through simulated attacks to validate the exploitability of identified vulnerabilities.
• Actionable Insights with prioritized remediation guidance based on the potential exposure impact.​

In addition, you can pair Pentera with PlexTrac to bridge the gap between automated threat detection and actionable remediation. By importing Pentera’s validated findings into PlexTrac, you accelerate remediation, improve team collaboration, and enhance your security posture. PlexTrac’s penetration test reporting platform reduces aggregation and reporting time by half by bringing all posture and risk assessment data sources together.

2. Horizon3.ai NodeZero: Autonomous Penetration Testing for CTEM

NodeZero by Horizon3.ai is an autonomous penetration testing platform designed to continuously assess and improve organizations’ security posture. It simulates real-world attack scenarios to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and credential exposures across internal, external, cloud, and hybrid environments.​

NodeZero features include: 

• Continuous assessments with the ability to perform unlimited production-safe penetration tests, which provide ongoing visibility into your security environment. 
• Mapping that details misconfigurations, exploitable CVEs, and other weaknesses to illustrate potential attack paths.
• Prioritized remediation based on real-world risk that aligns with the CTEM framework and goal of actionable security posture improvement. 

In addition, by integrating the NodeZero platform with PlexTrac’s threat exposure management platform, you can consolidate findings from various tools, import penetration test results directly into their workflow, facilitate efficient reporting and remediation tracking, and enhance collaboration and response times.​

Ready to Evolve Into CTEM With PlexTrac?

If you’re looking to embrace Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and reduce risk through persistent testing and remediation, PlexTrac should be your go-to platform. With its powerful capabilities to streamline and operationalize red and blue team collaboration, automate reporting, and centralize findings across all testing efforts, PlexTrac empowers security teams to move faster and more strategically.

For organizations or clients seeking to integrate automated pentesting into their CTEM workflow, we also recommend exploring complementary tools like Pentera and Horizon3.ai. These platforms can enhance your exposure management strategy with scalable, high-frequency testing, while PlexTrac ensures findings are captured, tracked, and resolved efficiently.

Don’t just react—stay ahead. Request a personalized demo of PlexTrac today and take the next step toward a proactive, continuously validated security program.

PlexTrac Author At PlexTrac, we bring together insights from a diverse range of voices. Our blog features contributions from industry experts, ethical hackers, CTOs, influencers, and PlexTrac team members—all sharing valuable perspectives on cybersecurity, pentesting, and risk management.