Why is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (TEM) Important?
Continuous threat exposure management is vital because it’s a proactive approach to identify and fix the biggest cyber threats to an organization’s security – making it a harder target and reducing its probability of being the victim.
A successful data breach or other security incident can be extremely expensive and damaging to an organization.
Key Components of Threat Exposure Management (TEM)
Here are the key elements of a TEM security program that help you stay safe:
- Continuous Monitoring: TEM solutions perform regular scans of an organization’s entire attack surface to detect vulnerabilities and assess the risk that they pose to their security.
- Vulnerability Prioritization: Vulnerabilities come with varying levels of risk to an organization. Prioritization is essential to ensure that time and resources are allocated in a way that maximizes the return on investment (ROI).
- Risk Management: Vulnerabilities are mitigated in order of priority and in a way that minimizes risk to the organization.
- Communication and Collaboration: Cybersecurity risks and threats affect more than just the security department. Communicating with stakeholders across the organization helps them to understand potential impacts and builds a security culture.
Five Stages of TEM Implementation
A TEM program is a formal method of identifying, tracking, and fixing potential security risks to an organization’s critical assets.
This program can be broken up into five main stages:
- Scoping: TEM implementation begins with defining the program’s scope. This ensures that the organization is monitoring and managing risk across its entire digital attack surface, including on-prem, cloud, remote workers, and supply chain.
- Discovery: After the scoping stage defines the areas where an organization is looking to manage risk, the discovery phase identifies assets and the risks associated with them. The security team will identify the IT assets that an organization has and then look for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other risks associated with these digital assets.
- Prioritization: Different vulnerabilities have varying levels of exploitability and potential impacts on the organization. During the prioritization stage, the security team looks at the threat intelligence for each identified risk profile and ranks them accordingly.
- Validation: The validation stage is focused on determining how well the organization is currently protected against a particular risk. This is best accomplished via penetration testing, which helps you see how the organization manages the threat landscape with its incident response.
- Mobilization: So far, the TEM process has largely been about determining what security issues an organization needs to resolve. This final phase addresses the potential attack paths, building workflows and leveraging automation to efficiently fix the vulnerabilities identified to date.
TEM vs. CTEM
Here are the differences between threat exposure management and continuous threat exposure management:
| Feature |
TEM |
CTEM |
| Process |
Manual or semi-automated |
Automated |
| Monitoring |
Regular, but not continuous |
Continuous |
| Visibility |
Periodic snapshots of security posture |
Real-time view of attack surface |
| Vulnerability Management |
Prioritization based on periodic scans |
Ongoing prioritization based on evolving threats |
| Remediation |
May be delayed due to gaps in visibility |
Optimized due to up-to-date threat information |
The primary difference between TEM and CTEM is how frequently an organization performs these actions. With TEM, processes may be human-driven and performed on a regular, but not ongoing, basis. While this provides visibility into an organization’s security posture and proactively addresses potential threats, visibility gaps exist between the end of the last round of discovery and the beginning of the next.
CTEM integrates continuous monitoring into TEM to offer real-time visibility into the organization’s digital attack surface. By automating TEM processes, CTEM enables security teams to maintain up-to-date visibility into their biggest threats, enabling optimized remediation.
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (TEM) Program with IGS
TEM requires identification and remediation efforts for a wide range of potential security threats. A TEM program’s scope should include all of an organization’s potential IT security risks, including:
- On-prem
- Cloud
- Remote
- Supply chain
The security personnel managing the program should be familiar with the potential risks to these systems and have the ability to validate the defenses via simulated attacks.
Check Point offers a range of cybersecurity consulting services designed to support a corporate TEM program. These include external attack surface management, penetration testing, consulting, and security control. Learn more about implementing your corporate TEM program by checking out the full range of Infinity Global Services assessment offerings.
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