What is Exposure Management?
Exposure management (EM) describes the process of proactively identifying, assessing, and mitigating vulnerabilities to reduce an organization’s attack surface and strengthen its security posture against evolving threats. Exposure management provides deeper insights into any security gaps and weaknesses in business-critical assets that pose the highest risk of a potential breach.
Endpoints are prime targets for threat actors since so many new entry points are continually introduced into the corporate network. A study by the IDC revealed that 70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint. That’s where the threats typically begin, but they spiral further when you consider how many compromised cloud environments exist or who has access to them.
Cloud misconfigurations account for 15% of initial attack vectors in security breaches.
The statistic above is concerning, given the sensitive data that is stored in the cloud. Exposure management encompasses the entire security stack – across endpoints, networks, cloud-based applications, data, and all other digital assets at risk.
What Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and Its Role in Exposure Management?
Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a five-stage cybersecurity framework that helps organizations continuously prioritize and mitigate vulnerabilities. CTEM helps address several key concerns that an organization faces, such as:
- Which critical assets are most vulnerable to potential breaches?
- How can we automate the discovery of unknown or rogue assets on our network?
- Are we correctly mapping and tracking vulnerabilities across the entire attack surface?
- From which sources are we collecting threat intelligence data?
- Are we truly prepared for an advanced ransomware attack?
- What should we patch today?
- Have we built a threat modeling strategy to anticipate and assess potential attack paths?
These are all important questions that a CTEM can help address.
The 5 Stages of Continuous Threat Exposure Management
Scoping
The initial stage involves an exposure management assessment scope based on risks and business priorities. This requires collaboration across various departments within the organization to ensure that business objectives and priorities are fully aligned.
Discovery
The discovery stage helps add business context for the identified vulnerabilities found across the areas defined in the scope. Assets are classified based on risk level and attack paths are mapped to determine the likelihood of threats impacting the scoped assets. Data is collected and aggregated from various sources, including threat intelligence feeds, cyber risk assessments, asset inventories, and threat hunting frameworks such as the MITRE ATT&CK and open-source intelligence.
Prioritization
The next stage in exposure management focuses on prioritizing mitigation of risks to reduce their impact. Examples of scoring systems include the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), and National Vulnerability Database (NVD), which rank the severity of vulnerabilities based on factors such as impact and complexity of the attack. But relying on any of these scoring systems alone is not enough; a robust prioritization framework focuses on urgency, exploitability, business impact, and active threats. This ensures that attention is focused on real, actionable risks.
Each organization has different ways of measuring security posture. For example, some might use cybersecurity maturity levels and may define risk scores according to their specific business objectives. Prioritization becomes a complex mission, as many organizations have entire backlogs of vulnerabilities that haven’t been addressed yet. In some instances, it could be because the security team leaders are no longer with the organization or had other priorities and left them unpatched. In other cases, limited resources or budget constraints may delay remediation efforts.
A comprehensive cyber risk assessment should be conducted during the prioritization stage to review all open vulnerabilities, assign/reassign key stakeholders, and set benchmarks before the next audit cycle.
Validation
Validation ensures that an organization’s security measures are effective against potential attacks. Pentesting and red teaming are both highly effective methods for validating security controls and assumptions by simulating actual attack scenarios from the perspective of an adversary.
Both pentesting and red teaming involve various tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used in real-world attacks to evaluate the organization’s overall response capabilities. An ethical red teamer can uncover hidden vulnerabilities in open-source third-party dependencies that might be plaguing your software supply chain or stumble upon a zero-day exploit that has yet to be publicly disclosed.
Organizations incorporating red team security testing experienced a 25% reduction in security incidents and a 35% reduction in the cost of those incidents. – Forrester
Research from Forrester showed that organizations incorporating red team security testing experienced a 25% reduction in security incidents and a 35% reduction in the cost of those incidents. Suffice it to say that red teaming yields a positive return.
Mobilization
The final stage of exposure management focuses on remediation planning through a collaborative effort across the organization. Cyber risk quantification is an effective way to measure risk with actionable KPIs, helping organizations estimate the financial impact of threat mitigation efforts.
Should you patch the affected system immediately, or can mitigation be deprioritized in favor of fixing more business-critical risks? The answer may seem obvious, but without a structured approach to quantifying risk, organizations may fail to prioritize business-critical threats that could disrupt operations and lead to a massive breach.
Cyber risk quantification provides data-driven insights to support these decisions, ensuring that security efforts align with business priorities and risk levels. Mobilization is an ongoing process of an exposure management strategy that unites key stakeholders to execute risk-informed mitigation strategies.
“By 2026, organizations that prioritize their security investments based on a continuous exposure management program will be three times less likely to suffer a breach.” – Gartner
Exposure Management vs. Vulnerability Management – Understanding the Key Differences
Although often used interchangeably, vulnerability management and exposure management differ in terms of scope, focus, and strategies used to reduce an organization’s risk posture.
Both approaches provide valuable insights for mitigating risk; however, they vary in outcomes. For example, vulnerability management focuses on prioritizing mitigation efforts within affected systems or applications, whereas exposure management takes a broader, more holistic view of the entire attack surface, evaluating risk from a wider, organizational perspective.
Vulnerability Management
- Scope: Focuses on the identification and mitigation of vulnerabilities in an organization’s systems, networks, and processes based on severity levels
- Strategy: Focuses on scanning and patching known vulnerabilities based on CVSS severity scores (0-10)
- Approach: A reactive approach that addresses vulnerabilities once discovered
- Outcome: Focuses on the mitigation of asset-level vulnerabilities, such as high-risk cloud-based resources or other critical assets detected during vulnerability scans
Exposure Management
- Scope: Leverages threat modeling insights, attack path analysis, and business impact to quantify risk based on the organization’s security posture
- Strategy: Prioritization is based on the likelihood of exploitation from real-world threat scenarios and adversary behavior (TTPs)
- Approach: Proactive approach that continuously identifies and mitigates security risks
- Outcome: Cyber risk quantification helps prioritize mitigation based on business risk in the decision-making processes, involving a collaborative effort across different departments and key stakeholders
4 Benefits of Exposure Management
Attack path analysis
An attack path analysis helps trace the potential routes that threat actors might take to exploit vulnerabilities and compromise systems. For example, a weak password can allow an attacker to bypass security controls and escalate privileges to gain access to critical assets.
An attack path analysis (APA) provides a visualization of the many possible attack vectors, and connected resources, and calculates the potential business impact in the event of a security incident.
For example, a misconfigured S3 bucket might serve as an entry point for an attacker, allowing them to exfiltrate sensitive data. An attack path can map that S3 bucket to a risky AWS cloud environment and show how an attacker could move laterally within the network, further compromising other cloud resources.
The risks become even more complex for a large-scale enterprise with hundreds of thousands of potential attack routes and an infinite possibility of pathways across a volume of interconnected cloud environments. An APA also helps identify and map network assets against business risks in a visual graph flow that all stakeholders can understand and benchmark over time.
Proactive threat mitigation
Effective threat mitigation begins by having the right data. Security teams can integrate threat intelligence feeds from multiple sources to gain a contextual understanding of how each threat could impact business-critical assets. Open source intelligence (OSINT) provides a treasure trove of information that is scraped from social networks, the MITRE ATT&CK framework, dark web forums, indicators of compromise (IOC) tools, TTPs, and even from LLMs (large language models) trained on threat actor behavior and tactics.
Threat researchers can then use the collected intel to build threat actor profiles and base mitigation on attack patterns and hypotheses. The aggregated data also lets you know whether your existing security measures are effective or must be upgraded. Threat intelligence also keeps you informed on the latest ransomware tactics, trends, exploit techniques, and motives.
Let’s shine a spotlight on ransomware for a moment.
32% of ransomware attacks originated from an unpatched vulnerability.
Data from The State of Ransomware 2024 revealed that 32% of ransomware attacks originated from an unpatched vulnerability. Ransomware incidents have surged over the past year, with separate research showing that 30,000 new vulnerabilities were disclosed in 2024, representing a 17% year-over-year increase.
Exposure management enhances threat intelligence data by continuously assessing risk and prioritizing critical vulnerability mitigation to reduce the attack surface.
Validating security controls
Are the tools you’re using effective at mitigating threats? Hopefully, the answer is “yes,” but in many instances, an organization doesn’t either know how many security tools they have or whether they’re contributing to positive business outcomes and cybersecurity ROI.
Exposure management helps assess the effectiveness of those security controls. Maybe it’s time to replace those outdated legacy systems in favor of a continuous exposure management platform that can yield a far greater return on security.
Only 29% of CISOs say they have an adequate budget to implement their cybersecurity projects and achieve their security goals.
How so? Through context-based mitigation and by assessing an organization’s cybersecurity maturity. This is especially important for CISOs to communicate risk more efficiently to the board. A study found that only 29% of CISOs say they have an adequate budget to implement their cybersecurity projects and achieve their security goals.
A cybersecurity maturity assessment can help bridge the gap and align business objectives with KPIs that can be tracked and measured over time.
Cyber risk quantification
Are you correctly allocating budgets toward mitigation activities? More importantly, do you know which business-critical assets are at the greatest immediate risk today? An exposure management program enables security teams to make more data-driven decisions and prioritize threat mitigation based on business context.
The most realistic way to present these findings is by estimating the potential cost savings from a breach. If a potential breach is estimated at $3 million, while mitigation efforts require a total investment of $150,000, the cost-benefit analysis strongly justifies immediate action and presents a compelling case for C-level executives and the board to prioritize security investments.
The cost savings extend beyond direct monetary losses attributed to the breach, since legal fees, compliance penalties, and customer attrition are all factors that contribute to the total financial impact of an incident – or the bigger picture. So, that hypothetical $3 million breach could hit upward of $30-50 million with all variables combined.
Understanding Exposure Management in Your Organization with CYE
Exposure management is vital for organizations to gain a better understanding of various attack paths and threat surfaces to build a stronger cyber resilience program and ensure that mitigation is directly tied to business-critical assets.
CYE understands that the cost of a breach varies depending on an organization’s cyber posture, maturity level, and size. It might only take a single unpatched exploitable vulnerability in a cloud environment to escalate into a full-scale breach.
Find out which assets pose the highest business risk and the financial consequences of a breach in your organization.
