Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM): Prioritizing Real Risks with Exposure Validation 

Yoni Harris, Product Manager
Paul Ashwood, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Security leaders recognize the value of proactive security and offensive testing to get ahead of cyber threats. They have made significant investments in tools and resources to identify the weaknesses and gaps that exist in their IT environment, only to realize that there are more vulnerabilities and misconfigurations than they could ever possibly fix. 

The fact is, any organization will always have hundreds, even thousands of vulnerabilities that need fixing and patching at any point in time, given the speed at which their IT environment changes, the evolving threat landscape and new vulnerabilities discovered daily. 

It’s not about what’s vulnerable, it’s about what’s exploitable 

What security teams don’t need is more tools, producing more lists of things to fix. Instead, security teams need a solution that can pinpoint those vulnerabilities that, if exploited by a threat actor, could result in a material impact on their business (and not in a good way). In addition, they want remediation guidance to help fix the issues and prevent the attacks without having to patch every vulnerability on every single system. 

These needs are driving an evolution beyond vulnerability management to continuous threat exposure management which demands continuous validation of security defenses to filter the potentially thousands of vulnerabilities and security gaps and focus on what is truly exploitable. 

Exposure validation focuses on truly exploitable threats 

The Cymulate Exposure Validation Platform was designed to deliver the key validation outcomes you need to help identify the most critical things you can resolve (or fix) that will remove the greatest areas of risk and impact on your business. Security teams can use the Cymulate platform to: 

• Better understand the likelihood of a successful attack 
• Determine the highest level of impact to their business 
• Optimize security controls to better protect their business 
• Enhance their operational response and remediation capabilities 

While risk is a factor of likelihood X impact, organizations typically know full well what the impact would be if a critical IT system were to be compromised. But what they are less clear about is the likelihood of a successful attack on those systems.  

Why exposure validation is essential for effective security 

Cymulate helps security teams meet the demands for continuous validation of their security defenses by scaling their offensive testing capabilities using automation to identify the weaknesses that could lead to a material cyber breach. Our solution puts your security team in control to prevent more and detect better by allowing every red and blue teamer to prove real threats and focus on the exploitable.   

The solution uses breach and attack simulations of real-world attack scenarios to assess the likelihood of a successful attack by confirming that attackers could really exploit previously discovered vulnerabilities and that your compensating security controls would not be able to stop the attack in their current configuration. Executing a wide range of automated attack simulations and network penetration tests enables your security team to quickly determine the paths a threat actor could take to get to your critical IT assets and which vulnerabilities on those paths could lead to the highest level of potential business impact.  

Unifying security technologies for a stronger defense 

By unifying the technologies of breach and attack simulation (BAS), continuous automated red teaming (CART) and attack surface management (ASM), we enable organizations to achieve their strategic business objectives of enhancing their security posture and mitigating their cyber risk against the latest threats before an attack occurs. These tools remain very important technologies that support a new solution with a higher purpose, and that solution is Exposure Management. 

Focus on taking remediation actions to mitigate risk  

Armed with the knowledge of which vulnerabilities are truly exploitable and could cause the biggest business impact, your security engineers can now configure, fine-tune and optimize those security controls that failed to block the threat and mitigate your exposure to cyber risks. 

Having visibility to attacks and potential threats is critical when defending against today’s advanced persistent threat actors or APT groups. Detecting potentially malicious threat activity from stealthy threat actors in your network or cloud environment is crucial to stopping an attack before it reaches a point of material impact on your business. 

Validating threat detections in your SIEM / SOAR environment and understanding how your teams respond to those threats is key to minimizing business impact when a real threat strikes. The ability to detect a threat and initiate mitigation actions to remediate the threat in a timely manner is what enables your organization to enhance its security posture and ultimately keep pace with the evolving threat landscape.  

The Cymulate Exposure Validation Platform helps you determine whether the controls and processes you have in place to respond and remediate the identified issues are fast enough and adequate for your business. The platform offers mitigation guidance, EDR mitigation rules, SIEM detection rules (or Sigma rules), and Indicators of Compromise (or IOCs) to help tune your controls, retest your environment and achieve an acceptable level of risk for your business. 

Building confidence in your cybersecurity program 

Cymulate integrates with your existing security technologies to drive actionable insights and provide you with the proof and evidence you need to answer with confidence when asked the question: “Are we exposed?” By validating your security controls and operational response to the latest simulated threats before an actual attack occurs, you can proactively fortify your defenses with the knowledge of where your biggest areas of risk and impact are. 

Exposure validation is essential to achieving continuous threat exposure management 

Validation is arguably the most important step in the Gartner process for Continuous Threat Exposure Management (or CTEM). This is the step where a prioritized list of vulnerabilities gets filtered down to those vulnerabilities that are truly exploitable. Validation tools and technologies like BAS, CART and ASM become enablers of your strategic business objectives to minimize cyber risks when used in a unified platform to support a broader CTEM solution. 

How the Cymulate Exposure Validation Platform Strengthens Cyber Resilience 

The Cymulate Exposure Validation Platform enables you to: 

• Continuously validate and tune your security controls 
• Optimize the security of your cloud platforms 
• Improve the mean time to detect for your security operations team 
• Increase threat resilience against the latest immediate threats 
• Measure and baseline your cyber resilience and level of cyber risk  

Once you have your security controls and defenses tuned to deliver an acceptable level of risk for your business, you can continuously measure and monitor your risk to prevent drift as new threats emerge or changes are made to your IT environment. 

Exposure validation helps you find and fix true exposures to maximize the investments you have in your existing security solutions by validating they are operating as intended.