continuous threat exposure management (CTEM)

What is CTEM?

CTEM stands for Continuous Threat Exposure Management. Coined by Gartner, it’s a cyber security framework focused on continuously identifying, assessing, and reducing your organization's exposure to real-world threats.

Instead of reacting to threats after they happen, CTEM helps you stay ahead by proactively managing risk on an ongoing basis.

Think of CTEM as a feedback loop that constantly looks for gaps in your defenses - whether they come from misconfigurations, known vulnerabilities, exposed assets, or weak identity access. It’s about more than just scanning - it’s a cycle of discovery, validation, and remediation.

How does CTEM work?

CTEM programs typically follow a five-stage process:

1. Scoping – Define what you’re assessing (e.g. cloud infrastructure, internet-facing assets, internal networks)
2. Discovery – Identify assets, vulnerabilities, and exposures in your environment
3. Prioritization – Evaluate findings based on risk and business impact
4. Validation – Confirm whether exposures can be exploited
5. Mobilization – Take action to remediate or mitigate the risks

This cycle repeats continuously, helping you reduce your attack surface over time.

How does CTEM differ from traditional vulnerability management?

Traditional vulnerability management focuses on identifying and fixing known vulnerabilities. CTEM goes further by:

• Including threat intelligence and exploit validation
• Assessing how exposures relate to your specific environment
• Covering more than just software vulnerabilities (e.g. identity issues, misconfigurations, exposed assets)
• Focusing on continuous and prioritized action - not just patching

In short, CTEM is broader, more proactive, and more risk-aware.

Why is CTEM important?

CTEM helps organizations:

• Reduce their attack surface continuously
• Focus on exposures that matter most
• Validate risks before dedicating resources to fix them
• Build a more resilient and mature security posture

With evolving threats and expanding digital environments, CTEM offers a modern, practical way to stay one step ahead.

How Intruder supports CTEM

Intruder's unified exposure management platform helps organizations implement CTEM in the following ways:

Discover

• Unified exposure management: Proactively discover weaknesses across your entire attack surface in one place - no complexity, no context‑switching.
• Automated asset discovery: Intruder continuously uncovers subdomains, login pages, APIs, admin panels, and databases before attackers do.
• Proactive protection: Intruder launches emerging threat scans as soon as new checks are available and triggers adaptive scans whenever your cloud or on‑prem environment changes.

Prioritize

• ‍A single view of risks: Triage your cloud misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, exposed assets and other weaknesses in one place.
• Risk‑based prioritization: Intruder combines CVSS severity with EPSS exploit likelihood to highlight vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited in the next 30 days.
• Noise reduction: By surfacing the most relevant risks, Intruder helps teams stay focused and avoid alert fatigue.

Mobilize

• Workflow automation: Intruder integrates with tools like Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams to fit into your existing workflows.
• Simple remediation advice: Every issue comes with clear, step‑by‑step guidance to help teams resolve issues fast.
• Audit‑ready compliance reporting: Generate evidence for frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and more - ready for auditors in seconds.

Kickstart your CTEM program - get started with a free 14 day trial of Intruder.