I recently earned a certificate in exposure management and here’s some of the key takeaways. Cyber teams now have a broad attack surface with assets ranging from on-prem to IoT and cloud solutions. Traditional vulnerability management simply can’t keep up. That’s where exposure management steps in: it combines threat context, asset criticality, and automated validation to focus your efforts on what really matters.
What Is Exposure Management? Introducing CTEM
Gartner coined Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to describe a cyclical, risk-driven process involving five stages:
Scoping – Identify the attack surface and high-value assets
Discovery – Detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity gaps
Prioritization – Score exposures based on CVSS/EPSS, asset importance, and threat intel
Validation – Use BAS, pentesting, or attack simulations to confirm exploitability
Mobilization – Automate remediation workflows and measure outcomes
By 2026, Gartner predicts organizations embracing CTEM will be three times less likely to suffer a breach (source).
Building an Exposure Management Program
Let’s break down the five stages above into actionable steps:
1. Scoping & Asset Categorization
Group assets by business importance: External, Critical Infra, Legacy Define pilot domains (e.g., customer-facing servers)
2. Discovery & Filtering
Scan using a vulnerability scanner (Rapid7 / Tenable) or endpoint solution (Ivanti / Crowdstrike) to automatically find assets connected to the network
3. Risk Scoring
Merge CVSS/EPSS, threat intel (KEV), exploit availability, and asset criticality to create an overall exposure score
4. Validation
Trigger purple team / attack simulations against prioritized flaws to confirm attack paths, success of remediation and resiliency
5. Mobilization & Reporting
Auto-generate tickets with context and score Track KPIs: Mean Exposure Score, Time-to-remediate, patch coverage Governance: Align with NIST CSF / SP 800‑53 control objectives
Potential Accompanying Tools
- External Attack Surface Management (EASM)
- Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP) – Contextual scanning, threat intel integration
- Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) – BAS + automated red teaming
Evidence-Backed Enhancements
A recent academic model, Vulnerability Management Chaining, combines KEV, EPSS, and CVSS to reduce remediations by 95% while maintaining 85% threat coverage .(source)
Summary
It’s more important than ever to evolve existing vulnerability management programs into exposure management. The continual cycle of assessing risk based on business needs and criticality, alongside validation of risk using attack simulations, greatly improves the over security of the organization and puts you on a better path to prevent a breach.