Executive Summary

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital transformation, businesses grapple with escalating cybersecurity risks, prompting a departure from traditional Vulnerability Management to the more dynamic Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). The traditional approach of Vulnerability Management, centered on identifying and remediating known vulnerabilities, falls short in the face of today's complex IT environments. Manual remediation planning and passive identification lead to inaccurate risk assessments, necessitating a shift to a more robust and adaptive cybersecurity strategy.

Key Advancements of CTEM Over Vulnerability Management

CTEM, as conceptualized by Gartner, introduces a transformative framework comprising scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization. Unlike its predecessor, CTEM expands its scope beyond known assets to encompass rogue elements, cloud services, and SaaS applications, offering a long-term solution that continuously learns from each iteration. It emphasizes continuous scanning, adapting to rapid changes in code deployment, configurations, and user errors. With integrated threat context, CTEM not only prioritizes vulnerabilities based on severity but also aids blue teams in minimizing the severity of breaches, providing a more strategic and informed approach to cybersecurity.

The Role of Nanitor: A Comprehensive CTEM Solution

Nanitor emerges as a leading CTEM solution, surpassing traditional vulnerability comparisons. Going beyond the basics, Nanitor aids organizations in scoping by identifying unknown assets, discovering vulnerabilities not captured in standard databases, and prioritizing critical security issues through the Nanitor Diamond™ methodology. With features like framework compliance, data normalization, minimal resource requirements, and comprehensive reporting, Nanitor streamlines the implementation of a CTEM program. As organizations transition from traditional Vulnerability Management, Nanitor becomes a strategic ally, empowering them to proactively address evolving cyber threats.

Conclusion: Embracing CTEM for Enhanced Cybersecurity Resilience

As Gartner predicts that organizations prioritizing a continuous exposure management program will be three times less likely to suffer breaches by 2026, the adoption of CTEM, bolstered by solutions like Nanitor, becomes imperative for businesses aiming to fortify their cybersecurity posture. This paradigm shift ensures not only a more accurate depiction of the attack surface but also reduced incident response times, streamlined workflows, and cost savings, marking a significant leap forward in the ongoing battle against cyber threats.

The Key Differences Between CTEM and Vulnerability Management

Businesses across all industries are digitally transforming and these changes increase the cybersecurity risks that their organization faces. Automated tools, SaaS applications, and data held by 3^rd party supply chain partners blur the security perimeter that used to be easily defined by identifying what assets were in your organization. Vulnerability Management programs were effective when the security perimeter was definitive, but with the constantly evolving IT environments business run now, we’re in need of a program that can tackle these changes and protect the growing attack surface. Gartner has developed a new program that is an evolution of vulnerability management called Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). Before diving into the improvements, let’s revisit what a vulnerability management program consists of.

What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability Management programs focused on the organizations total risk exposure by identifying known hardware and software vulnerabilities, remediating these weaknesses, and restarting the cycle. Organizations typically start by comparing their known assets to the list of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). The tools typically used, develop a report where organizations could view what assets have vulnerabilities and a qualitative score that let the readers know the severity of the vulnerability. Security teams then make plans on how to remediate the findings. This methodology does address vulnerabilities for static IT environments but remediation planning is manual, vulnerability identification is passive, and several other types of vulnerabilities are missed in the process. With these problems alone, it’s easy to see that organizations are not accurately identifying their risk posture.

What is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?

Gartner defines the objective of CTEM as “getting consistent, actionable security posture remediation and improvement plan that business execs can understand and architecture teams can act upon.” (Gartner, 26 July 2022, Implement a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Program). This objective is achieved through the following five core stages:

• Scoping: Identify assets valuable to business lines, impacts on service disruption, and extend past traditional assets to include code repositories, 3^rd party supply chain systems, etc.
• Discovery: In addition to CVEs, identify misconfigurations, security controls, rogue assets, etc.
• Prioritization: Don’t rely on severity scores but instead a combination of urgency, severity, compensating controls, and which assets are essential to critical business functions. Not all risks need to be mitigated but the organization needs to focus on critical business assets with vulnerabilities that are the most likely to be exploited
• Validation: This involves the likelihood of exploiting a vulnerability, potential pivoting in the attack path, and whether remediation efforts are sufficient. This involves a combination of red team and blue team tasks for testing but also verifying the efficiency of the processes in place
• Mobilization: Automated remediation can be used for simple issues but the focus here is streamlining implementation and mitigation deployments. That requires defined communication channels and cross-team approval workflows

The CTEM program is cyclical and could be triggered by business projects, risk appetite changes, upgrades to security controls, and changes to the IT environment. It is important that each stage is repeated during each iteration so that organizations are able to learn “why” and “how” elements are discovered.

What Are the Main Differences Between CTEM and Vulnerability Management?

Both programs provide a benefit in addressing weaknesses to an organization but it is clear that there are improvements in the CTEM program. From a high-level perspective, CTEM expands past traditional devices, involves continuous monitoring, shifts from a tactical approach to reduce exposure to future threats, automates processes and requires collaboration in order to be effective.  Let’s take a further look into the primary differences between CTEM and Vulnerability management.

Scope

Working with an inventory of known assets and vulnerabilities just isn’t sufficient anymore. Organizations need to expand where they look and what they’re looking for. Like previously mentioned, this could be rogue assets, cloud services, and SaaS applications that attackers know are not as protected or possibly not protected at all. This also requires that organizations look into other possible weaknesses such as misconfigurations, missing security controls, and data held by 3^rd parties.

Another notable scope change is that CTEM is focused on a long-term solution as opposed to the current trend where security teams review a list of their vulnerabilities, and fix issues based on severity. These vulnerability reports tend to get longer as IT environments change and security teams are constantly struggling on keeping up with remediation efforts. By following the 5 phases in the CTEM program, information learned is implemented when designing new features and security incident response times are reduced overtime.  

Frequency

CTEM programs are focused on continuous scanning as opposed to periodic scans that vulnerability management programs were based on. Code deployment, configuration changes, environmental changes and user error can change your attack surface rapidly and continuous monitoring is the only way that agile organizations will be able to identify these changes. With this new approach, the holistic view of your devices will be essential. Tracking vulnerabilities across several tools will have your security teams struggling even if they had a vulnerability management program with prioritization in place. The data across all your devices will also have to normalized so that threats are accurately prioritized.

Threat Intelligence and Prioritization

Vulnerability management programs lack gathering threat context when providing vulnerability reports. Understanding how a vulnerability entered the system, where it could possibly pivot, and what remediation strategies are available help organizations better prepare. In the event of a security breach, the CTEM program can provide valuable information for blue teams that could minimize the severity of a given vulnerability and implement strategies that could improve the resilience of the IT system in the future. The cyclical nature of the CTEM program is designed so that each iteration provides new context to threats and mitigation strategies.

With the threat intelligence gained, security teams also gain context on how to prioritize the issues found in their environment. Vulnerability management programs typically relied on severity scores and the date the vulnerability was discovered in order to determine which vulnerability to prioritize. With CTEM, we gain context on the threat and couple that with information learned during the scoping phase of the CTEM program. This gives teams a strategy that they can act upon which is one of the groups identified in the objective of a CTEM program.

Automation

Continuous monitoring would not be possible without the need for automation. Automation plays an important role so that alerts are provided when new vulnerabilities are discovered, the attack surface changes, and for non-trivial remediation changes. However, teams must be aware that automation will not solve all your vulnerability problems. Due diligence is required because there is no “one solution fits all” when it comes to security and critical business requirements may supersede security controls. Compensating controls or accepting the risk may some times be the best choice for your environment.  

Collaboration

Most vulnerability management programs have suffered from silos that exist between IT teams and the technology that supports them. CTEM requires collaboration between IT and business teams so that prioritization, remediation, and strategies for the CTEM program are known throughout the organization. SMBs benefit from this collaboration since providing dedicated resources is simply not an option. It is important to note that although collaboration will be required, there is still need for someone who understands the holistic approach of the program and ensure all areas of the environment are being addressed.

Does CTEM Outperform Traditional Vulnerability Management?

According to Gartner, “By 2026, organizations prioritizing their security investments based on a continuous exposure management program will be three times less likely to suffer from a breach”. This due to the fact that organizations will be able to get an accurate depiction of their attack surface, vulnerabilities are detected in real time, and the consistent learning value gained by going through the phases of the CTEM program. Security teams can focus on executing strategies based on repeatable cycles and management can make informed decisions for critical business assets.

Organizations will also benefit from the required holistic approach when they reduce the number of tools required to execute a CTEM program. This will lead to teams spending less time on reports, reducing incident response time, established workflows between teams, and multiple reduced costs that stem from the use of various tools.

Why Should You Leverage Nanitor‘s CTEM Solution?

Nanitor is a CTEM solution that goes beyond simply comparing known vulnerabilities to a list of predefined assets. Nanitor is designed to help you during scoping by identifying unknown assets in your environment, discovering weaknesses not captured in CVEs, prioritizing assets with the Nanitor Diamond™ so that critical security issues are easily identifiable and addressed first, and providing remediation steps for validation.

Nanitor’s additional features include framework compliance across several industries, data normalization across the different platforms, minimal resource requirements, and valuable reporting features for management and technical audiences.

When Nanitor is evaluated as a stand-alone product, the value provided will help your organization implement a CTEM program if you are just starting or help you transition from a vulnerability management program.