CTEM or Breach: Living with Exposure in 2025

Cyber threats are evolving faster than businesses can patch up and secure their systems. The traditional security approach, which involves annual penetration tests, rigid compliance checklists, and periodic vulnerability scans, has proven ineffective against modern, sophisticated cyber threats.

In 2022, Gartner published a comprehensive report defining a different approach to combating cyber threats. The concept involves combining the various solutions into a more cohesive strategy known as the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM).

CTEM shifts the focus from reactive defense mechanisms to continuous proactive risk management. It prioritizes identifying, validating, prioritizing, and mitigating potential vulnerabilities before cyber criminals exploit them.

We spoke with five experts to understand how they utilize CTEM in their industries to prevent breaches before they occur. However, letus begin by understanding what CTEM really is and why it is a game-changing framework for addressing cyber threats.

What Is CTEM?

CTEM is not a tool or technology but a framework that helps organizations stay ahead of threats. It is a shared rhythm to scope what matters, assess potential exposures with business context, validate what can be exploited, and push changes through standard system maintenance windows.

The primary goal is to ensure that security efforts are fully tailored to the areas that matter most to the business, enhancing the efficacy of security measures. CTEM provides a holistic view of cybersecurity risks. It operates across five key stages:

• Scoping: The first stage of CTEM involves identifying critical assets, their exposure levels, and the potential attack paths that cybercriminals could exploit. This stage requires collaboration between the business and the security functions to define/refine what is mission-critical, high-value, or sensitive and core business objectives to support it.
• Discovery: This stage involves mapping the network, infrastructure, applications, and all sensitive data assets to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other technical or process flaws, and classifying their respective risks. The scan focuses on on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments.
• Prioritization: CTEM advocates evaluating the likelihood of exploitability as the basis to grade their relative importance. Where the likelihood of exploitability is low, the cybersecurity gap is scored as low priority and could be postponed if remediation resources are unavailable.
• Validation: The validation step utilizes various tools, such as breach and attack simulations, path simulations, or other controlled simulations, to validate the likelihood of exploitability for prioritized exposures and their impact on critical systems. The goal is to establish whether prioritized vulnerabilities can be exploited and whether the current defense plan will be effective in mitigating them.
• Mobilization: Closing the loop on the process involves communication and buy-in from all affected stakeholders of a remediation action plan, following the full validation of potential threat vectors. Since CTEM relies heavily on collaboration, the remediation operationalization is expected to be seamless.

How Is CTEM Different from RBVM?

Risk-based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) is a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy designed to help businesses mitigate risk by prioritizing vulnerability remediation plans.

To accomplish this, cybersecurity teams use various tools to assess existing vulnerabilities and establish the risk each vulnerability poses to business-critical assets. This process is automated mainly due to the scale involved.

Critically, RBVM is limited to prioritizing only potential vulnerabilities and doesn’t address misconfigurations and identity issues that attackers often exploit regularly.

CTEM dramatically reduces remediation efforts by prioritizing team efforts across all exposure types, not just vulnerabilities. This framework provides a holistic process for managing the risks over time. In other words, CTEM enhances RBVM by providing broader exposure coverage and additional remediation strategies.

Expert Insights: Case-Based Lessons & Implementations

While the concept of CTEM may sound abstract, its overall impact becomes clearer when you look at how different organizations are already applying it. Although exposure takes many forms across different industries, the underlying principle remains the same: unmanaged security gaps can quickly become breaches.

To illustrate what CTEM looks like in practice, we spoke with five industry leaders who have each faced high-stakes exposure challenges and implemented CTEM to transform reactive measures into proactive defenses. Their unique experiences highlight the problems, solutions implemented, and the measurable outcomes that CTEM delivers.

Safeguarding Financial Data in SaaS Platforms

SaaS businesses handle vast amounts of sensitive personal data, making third-party integrations and APIs a prime target for attackers. For CoinLedger, securing sensitive customer tax information amid an ever-growing web of external connections was a significant challenge.

“In SaaS, every new integration is a potential exposure point. Our team found that APIs connecting customer tax data to third-party services were being probed constantly. Implementing CTEM lets us continuously map and monitor those connections and close down risky endpoints before they are exploited. For us, CTEM is more than patching; it is about maintaining customer trust in a sector where data sensitivity is paramount,” says David Kemmer, CEO and Co-founder of CoinLedger.

Preventing Bot Infrastructure Hijacking

Scraper and bot infrastructure are double-edged swords. They provide great value but can be hijacked for malicious purposes. For a company like HasData that specializes in building scraping APIs, attackers constantly exploited bots to launch hidden DDoS attacks. This problem stayed under the radar until CTEM revealed the true scope of exposure.

“Our scraper infrastructure was once turned against us. Hijacked bots were exploited to launch hidden DDoS activity that almost ruined our reputation. After adopting CTEM, we could continuously assess where those vulnerabilities lived and shut down misuse in real time. The result was a 70% reduction in bot-related incidents. CTEM gave us unique visibility we didn’t know we were missing. Without this framework, the abuse would have kept scaling under the radar,” explains Roman Milyushkevich, CTO of HasData.

Protecting Client Websites on Shared Hosting

For hosting providers, one outdated plugin on a client’s CMS can easily compromise the security of many others. Hosting platform HostZealot faced this exact issue when outdated CMS plugins exposed hosting environments to malware.

“Shared hosting modifies exposure to a great extent. One outdated CMS plugin can ripple across multiple environments. Before CTEM, we were reacting to malware outbreaks after the incident. Today, we continuously scan for exposures, flag outdated plugins, and work with clients before those weak points are weaponized. This strategy has shifted us from being reactive to proactive, which is critical at hosting scale,” says Mike Kharchenko, web hosting expert at HostZealot.

Securing Proprietary AI Models and Data

As AI becomes a key business cornerstone, protecting both models and training data from exposure is critical. AI Tools Inc. faced risks where exposed APIs could have leaked sensitive prompts and proprietary data.

“Our proprietary AI models rely heavily on sensitive prompts and training data. We discovered that exposed APIs could have leaked both. Integrating CTEM into our workflows ensures we continuously map API endpoints and identify exposure risks as they emerge. This helps us to patch our systems quickly before attackers exploit them,” notes Mitchell Cookson, CEO of AI Tools Inc.

Reducing Account Takeover in E-Commerce

Credential stuffing remains a major headache for e-commerce platforms, especially as users tend to recycle passwords across sites. At Custom Writings, attackers repeatedly attempted account takeovers through stolen credentials, threatening customer trust and operational continuity.

“Credential stuffing attacks are relentless in e-commerce, especially with password reuse being so common. CTEM gave us a practical way to monitor login activity continuously, cross-reference leaked credentials, and spot takeover attempts early. We saw a significant drop in account takeovers. Still, more importantly, customer confidence grew because we could tell them we were actively monitoring exposure, not just reacting after exposure,” shares Jay Speakman, CTO of Custom Writings.

The Road Ahead: Living Securely with Exposure

As cyber threats continue to outpace traditional security models, CTEM is emerging as a game-changer. The framework has transformed exposure management into a continuous process, providing organizations with visibility, prioritization, and real-time defense against emerging threats.

The experts we spoke to have all achieved measurable gains after adopting CTEM. In a highly interconnected, API-driven world, CTEM is no longer a “nice to have” addition; it is a survival mechanism.