CISO’s Expert Guide To CTEM And Why It Matters

Cyber threats evolve—has your defense strategy kept up? A new free guide available here explains why Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is the smart approach for proactive cybersecurity.

This concise report makes a clear business case for why CTEM’s comprehensive approach is the best overall strategy for shoring up a business’s cyber defenses in the face of evolving attacks. It also presents a real-world scenario that illustrates how the business would fare against a formjacking attack under three security frameworks – Vulnerability Management (VM), Attack Surface Management (ASM), and CTEM. With VM, the attack might go unnoticed for weeks. With CTEM, simulated attacks detect and neutralize it before it starts.

Reassuringly, it also explains that CTEM builds on a business’s current VM and ASM solutions rather than requiring them to jettison anything they currently use.

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But first—

What is CTEM?

In response to increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, Gartner introduced Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) in 2022 as a more proactive security strategy. It laid out a five-step sequence of phases:

VM and ASM Limitations

With CTEM’s holistic approach, security teams can assess both internal and external threats and respond based on business priorities. Part of the problem with relying on a VM framework is that it focuses on identifying and patching known vulnerabilities within a company’s internal infrastructure. It’s limited in scope and reactive by nature, so while this approach may be useful for dealing with an attack at the moment, VM-oriented solutions don’t look beyond that. ASM offers a wider scope but is still limited. It provides visibility into external assets but lacks continuous validation capabilities, as the report explains.

CTEM combines the strengths of VM and ASM but also provides continuous monitoring, threat validation, attack simulation, penetration testing, and prioritization based on business impact.

CTEM is More Business-Relevant

For CISOs, prioritizing security efforts based on business impact is critical. Modern websites are highly dynamic, so security teams don’t have the time to block and investigate every single change that might occur without severely limiting website functionality and negatively affecting the business.

CTEM seeks to strike a balance between the competing demands of risk and cost by identifying and prioritizing the most potentially damaging risk factors. The level of risk that each business is willing to accept is referred to as its risk appetite, and by implementing a CTEM solution, it can respond to the threats it faces according to its own unique definition of where that level lies.

CTEM is a mature and effective strategy for managing today’s complex threat landscape, and while it can unlock better security cost-effectively, it does require strategic implementation. There are various CTEM solutions on the market that will fulfill the requirements of some or all of the implementation stages, and the downloadable PDF lists several of them (as well as a selection of VM and ASM solutions).

A good one will map all assets in a website’s digital infrastructure and monitor them for the kind of changes that signal the start of Magecart, ransomware, and other attacks, deliver timely alerts according to the company’s risk appetite, assist with compliance monitoring, and more. Download the guide now to learn how CTEM can proactively protect your business from formjacking, ransomware, and other advanced threats.

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