CTEM cybersecurity benefits could transform your vulnerability or attack surface management program.
According to Gartner, CTEM has the potential to prevent two-thirds of the breaches you might otherwise experience.
Without a way to understand vulnerabilities in the context of real risk, vulnerability management teams are guaranteed to become overwhelmed. There are simply too many theoretical vulnerabilities and risks in modern IT environments to plan remediation/mitigation based on CVEs alone.
CTEM solves this challenge by enriching the information surrounding vulnerabilities and giving you a framework for targeting the exact issues that will drive down your cyber risk.
In this blog post, we draw on our experience working with companies like Porsche, Nuvei and Virgin Atlantic to give you the nine core benefits that we’ve seen organizations get from integrating CTEM into their security operations, along with some data points that show why they matter.
1. Proactive Risk Reduction
With CTEM, security and remediation processes go from actions that happen “sometime” to a system that happens “all the time.”
By continuously monitoring and addressing exposures, organizations can approach their own environment like a skilled hacker or an advanced persistent threat (APT) would and see exploit paths that would otherwise be missed.
Why this matters: According to forensic investigations and intelligence operations by Verizon, there was a 180% growth of attacks involving the exploitation of vulnerabilities as the critical path to initiate a breach.
2. Continuous, Comprehensive Visibility of Your Attack Surface
On average, 20% of an organization’s cloud attack surface is replaced each month with new or updated services.
CTEM gives a real-time and complete view of all your external facing assets, including cloud services, applications, and networks. This means security teams can keep up with their attack surfaces even in very complex cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
Why this matters: 71% of security executives across industries say it’s difficult to keep up with security hygiene and posture management due to frequent changes and growth in the attack surface.
3. Reduced False Positives Through Vulnerability Validation
The vast majority of CVEs in any given environment are not actually dangerous. If you try to fix them based on version alone, you’re more than likely going to end up overwhelmed.
As per Gartner, step four of the CTEM process confirms threat actors could actually exploit a vulnerability, i.e., active validation through exploitation. The benefit of CTEM is a greatly reduced number of false positives and redundant work that security teams have to deal with.
Validated vulnerabilities also provide a more accurate picture of the organization’s security posture, enabling better decision-making and use of resources.
Why this matters: Only 5% of known vulnerabilities are both observed and exploited in a given environment.
4. Risk Prioritization
Prioritization is when you tackle your most dangerous risks first. This sounds obvious, but prioritization is only possible when you can validate, through active exploitation, the impact of potential risks.
CTEM, when done through a CTEM platform like Element Security, allows security teams to do just that, i.e., prioritize vulnerabilities based on their real-world exploitability. The benefit is that you get a small list of remediation/mitigation actions to take and a big risk reduction impact from each one.
Why this matters: 32% of security leaders say their SOC found it challenging to determine the severity of cyber threats and vulnerabilities.
5. Improved Collaboration and Coordination
How do you get IT, security, and even nontechnical stakeholders to work towards a safer attack surface?
The mobilization phase of CTEM brings different teams together when fixing the issues highlighted by the earlier stages of CTEM.
CTEM shows stakeholders the immediate impact of their work, e.g., fixing prioritized vulnerabilities leads to fewer risks when you scan your environment.
Why this matters: Collaboration makes cybersecurity much easier and is a growing trend: 87% of security executives say they are working more closely with other teams compared to a year ago—75% of security executives are joining forces more with IT operations this year, and 54% are collaborating more with software engineering.
6. Enhanced Compliance and Regulatory Adherence
CTEM helps embed compliance into security and IT operations.
CTEM continuously highlights potentially dangerous sources of data exposure and breaches of regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), etc., and makes it easy to communicate exact sources of regulatory risk to various teams.
Documentation and reporting generated during the CTEM process can also support regulatory audits and demonstrate due diligence.
Why this matters: 32% of business and IT professionals are concerned about regulation compliance.
7. Reduced Likelihood of Security Breaches
The one metric by which every cybersecurity program lives or dies is risk. CTEM is one of the best risk-reduction investments possible.
Gartner says that organizations that use CTEM to prioritize their security investments will be three times less likely to experience a breach. The reason why is that by continuously identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities, organizations reduce the chances of successful cyber-attacks. This capability has never been more important.
Why this matters: Data breaches are both a top concern and the attack experienced most often, with 52% of security executives reporting at least one data breach incident in the past two years.
8. Improved Stakeholder Confidence
Your clients, customers, insurers, and investors care about what you do to protect your digital assets. An organization that invests in CTEM is showing stakeholders that they are taking proactive steps to reduce any potential third-party risk they might create.
Continuous management of threats is clear evidence to customers, partners, and regulators that the organization is committed to security.
Why this matters: 30% of CISOs say addressing supplier risk awareness is among the top priorities for their organization’s IT security department over the next two years.
9. Simplification of Security Operations
Toolstack complexity is the enemy of cybersecurity. The more tools an organization uses, the less efficient it becomes.
When security teams have to swivel between different management consoles and data types, it physically takes longer to get to the results, and important process flows can easily break down.
CTEM brings together various security activities (including pen testing, vulnerability scanning, etc.) into a unified process, reducing complexity.
Why this matters: 29% of security leaders indicate some of their SOC’s barriers to identifying and remediating threats and vulnerabilities include the complexity of the IT environment.
Get These CTEM Benefits and More with a Full-Cycle CTEM Platform
The most cost-effective way to get CTEM benefits is to deploy a full-cycle CTEM platform like Element Security.
A CTEM platform allows you to consolidate the entire CTEM process into a single tool. Element Security’s CTEM platform can deliver the complete chain of CTEM capabilities, including asset discovery, vulnerability assessment, and, critically, validation.
Our platform allows you to actively exploit vulnerabilities just as a real threat actor would. This gives you highly accurate risk prioritization and an extremely low level of false positives so you can laser focus your remediation efforts.
We also provide detailed reports with remediation instructions and customizable CTEM playbooks that fit your operational reality.
Try Element Security Today
Element Security is a full-cycle CTEM solution that is extremely easy to deploy and use. Simply specify a target IP within our platform, and within minutes, you can start the CTEM process in your environment.
Try a free Element Security demo today to see just how easily you can get CTEM benefits.