Whether you’re the CISO or part of the incident response team, it’s likely you have heard of exposure management (EM).
Introduced by Gartner in 2022 as the evolution of vulnerability management (VM), the name “exposure management” was adopted by vendors faster than you can say “next gen” or “AI-powered”. Unfortunately for consumers the hype added more confusion than clarity.
This blog is a chance to reset expectations. First, the good news is that EM represents significant progress for reducing risk. Second, you are likely pursuing exposure management without realizing it.
IT security team managers are well aware of elevated stress levels during incident response. Critical issues even more so – responding to a breach or ransomware attack requires CISO, CEO and board of director level involvement.
Resolving issues before they escalate, for instance identifying a website handling PII without a WAF or an asset susceptible to HashiCorp Vault SSH CVE is the ideal goal for everyone involved.
Gartner’s EM definition reads like a CISO’s mission statement: “a set of processes that gives enterprises the awareness to continually and consistently evaluate the visibility, accessibility and vulnerability of their digital assets.”
Busy IT security teams need more detail or risk misinterpreting what to do or how best to do it. If there’s too much uncertainty, they may choose not to implement due to the time required to “figure it out”.
To this end, in 2024 Gartner added two sub-categories to EM: adversarial exposure validation (AEV) and exposure assessment platform (EAP). AEV focuses on testing attack paths, and EAP addresses vulnerability identification, assessment and prioritization. Together they form threat exposure management (TEM) and replaces the original “exposure management” terminology.
Implementing TEM starts with continuous threat exposure management (CTEM), a five-step program designed to operationalize the mission statement.
If you are frustrated by visibility and coverage challenges, and never-ending lists of issues that require manual reconnaissance, planning and revalidation, you aren’t alone. Many organizations have issues coming in faster than they can be resolved. For example, our recent study found 60% of surveyed organizations update web apps weekly or more often, yet 75% test their web apps monthly or less often: a clear disconnect.
Here are six signs your organization would benefit from TEM:
At the top of this blog, I wrote that you are likely pursuing TEM without realizing it. Why? Chances are, in your (brief) moments of downtime or the end of a team meeting, you’ve talked about perfect-world scenarios that reduce effort and increase your resilience against attack. As the evolution of vulnerability management, CTEM’s scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization phases capture many dream list items. (The definitions aren’t always obvious – don’t assume you know what they mean as I did; there are important nuances to each that are worth understanding.)
To scale and meet today’s IT demands—and prepare for future needs—start with the essentials with your implementation.
Together, these provide the core elements that tackle the majority of exposure management requirements: validated, meaningful issues that enable your teams to successfully respond.
Legacy technologies that lack these capabilities cannot dynamically react to attack surface change and miss the brunt of risks that fall outside of CVEs, like misconfigurations, exposed data, and security control validation (CVE detection technologies are forever playing catch up, for example, as of this writing NVD has a backlog of 17K+ vulnerabilities.)
With the right technology TEM implementation doesn’t have to be slow. If you have questions about fit, value and requirements, CyCognito offers two short guidebooks to help you:
CyCognito automates key CTEM scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization phases. Reach out to us to learn more about how organizations using the CyCognito platform achieve 95% of their EM technology goals for their external attack surfaces, with zero installation, configuration, or management. Automatically.
Jason Pappalexis has worked in cybersecurity for nearly two decades, holding roles across government security administration, third-party testing, solutions architecture, product management, and technical product marketing.
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The definitive guide to attack surface management. Learn everything you need to know to reduce your cyber security risk with attack surface management.
Exposure management is a set of processes which allow organizations to assess the visibility, accessibility, and risk factors of their digital assets.
Vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing vulnerabilities in a system.
Explore CyCognito modules ASM, AST and EI in the resources below.
Scalable, continuous, and comprehensive testing for all external assets, all the time.
CyCognito Automated Security Testing dynamically applies payload-based testing techniques across your entire external attack surface.
CyCognito Exploit Intelligence uses threat intelligence about attackers’ behavior and exploitability for enhanced prioritization.