What Is Exposure Management (EM)?
Exposure management (EM) in cybersecurity is the process of keeping tabs on and eliminating all attack surface threats. It’s sometimes thought of as vulnerability management, but in reality, it goes beyond that.
In fact, Gartner believes that “EM will supersede the vulnerability management practices of today,” as it ideally takes in all threats to an organization’s digital assets. This means extending beyond software vulnerabilities (CVEs) and threats from the dark web. It means more than ransomware gangs and RaaS-based attacks. It even means more than known threats and mapped devices.
At its best, exposure management covers all areas of your attack surface; even the assets you forgot about and the ones your developers left behind in Beta.
What Is the Problem with EM Vendors Today?
Many companies claim to offer exposure management in various forms, but few – if any – hit the mark.
Flying under the banner of attack surface management (ASM), these tools only provide visibility into known assets. They fail to recognize or uncover Shadow IT: Shadow IoT, Shadow APIs, and Shadow Data. Each missing asset is a hole in the fabric of your security posture.
According to ESG’s Security Hygiene and Posture Management Report, 69% of organizations say they have been the target of cyberattacks exploiting unknown, unmanaged, or poorly understood assets.
Today’s incomplete exposure management offerings leave the following loose ends:
Missing agents
Unscanned systems
Non-compliant devices
Cloud exposures
Overprivileged accounts
Accounts that were never decommissioned
Fragmented asset data
Unenriched alerts
Because current EM solutions still leave large patches of the attack surface exposed, choose an EM platform that follows the principles of the continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) framework.
What Should Exposure Management Cover?
Exposure management identifies, monitors, assesses, and reduces all potential cyber risks that could affect your organization’s attack surface, including:
Visibility gaps
Misconfigurations
Vulnerabilities
AI-based threats
Ransomware
Exposed endpoints
Identity-based threats
Excessive permissions
Non-compliant changes
Weaknesses in industrial control systems (SCADA)
Application coding errors
Dark web monitoring
Social media
Shadow IT
Undiscovered Assets
Everything. It collects, organizes, and normalizes data from across SIEM, EDR, and cloud detection systems, gathering threat data from all available internal and external sources to defend the entire attack surface.
However, not all exposure management providers can support this comprehensive approach, especially at the enterprise level.
Why is Exposure Management Needed?
Gartner noted back in 2023 that because today’s adversaries move fast, things like automated controls and security patches were not enough to “prevent future exposure” and adequately strengthen security posture. Instead, “What’s needed is a continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) program that surfaces and actively prioritizes whatever most threatens your business.”
The year before, they stated several reasons why:
More data is owned by partners and outside the organization’s immediate control. This needs to be protected.
Remote workers lack the same security controls as those working within corporate networks. This creates further exposure.
Enterprise threats transcend vulnerabilities and patches alone.
Expanding cloud services continue to grow the attack surface, necessitating comprehensive exposure management measures.
Continuous threat exposure management provides a proactive approach to filling these gaps, identifying threats to your data wherever it resides and reducing exposure ahead of time – not chasing threats with reactive fixes.
Key Principles of Exposure Management
Exposure management is built on five key cybersecurity components that work together to provide coverage over the entire attack surface.
1. Asset and Risk Discovery: Asset discovery is key to mapping the attack surface and identifying exposed resources. It’s all or nothing here. Leaving devices, services, and software unidentified can create risks for your business down the road. You can only patch, fix, strengthen, and protect what you can see. Look for:
Open ports
Vulnerabilities
Publicly accessible services
Unauthorized third-party integrations
Exposed APIs
New software
2. Risk Assessment: Now is the time to probe your mapped assets for weaknesses. At this stage potential threats are weighed, measured, and analyzed. Smart companies will do a risk assessment when it comes time for mergers and acquisitions, as the findings can change the value of the target before and after the deal.
3. Prioritizing Exposures: After getting the rundown on which assets are carrying which risks, it is time to prioritize remediation of the most critical issues first. The right exposure management platform can automatically do this for you. Consider:
How sensitive the asset it, or the data it handles.
The likelihood of it being attacked.
How much damage it would do to your enterprise.
4. Mitigating Threats: With clear marching orders, your team can confidently go after your organization’s most dangerous threats. Tackling them by potential impact ensures the fastest path to total attack surface remediation.
5. Continuous Monitoring: Threats will reappear. An exposure management program must be repeated on a constant loop to provide consistent coverage against today’s persistent adversaries. Continuous monitoring keeps all assets – and their respective threats – always within your sights.
Exposure Management vs. Vulnerability Management
Exposure management is the umbrella under which vulnerability management now rests. While vulnerability management focuses on weaknesses in applications and systems, exposure management identifies those plus every additional point of weakness on an enterprise attack surface - and it looks at it through the lens of business impact.
What is Exposure Management? Exposure management is like risk management for your attack surface. This includes anything that could provide a point of entry for attackers; misconfigurations, outdated software, excessive permissions, unpatched firewalls.
What is Vulnerability Management? Vulnerability management specifically hunts down software flaws, such as CVEs. These are typically prioritized in a vacuum, by CVSS score, without considering whether other cybersecurity dangers might be even more pressing.
Often, and always at an enterprise level, threats to a company’s digital infrastructure extend far beyond coding flaws alone. Stolen intellectual property, impersonated domains, and executive spoofing all widen the attack surface and weaken your overall security posture.
That is why exposure management encompasses not only internal visibility, but external threat intelligence and Digital Risk Protection (DRP). A good DRP program can detect threats across open, deep, and dark web sources, protecting far beyond what vulnerability scans can see.
3 Ways to Reduce Cyber Exposure
Attack Surface Management (ASM)
The attack surface represents the “sum of all potential entry points where a cyber threat could infiltrate a system, network, or application.” Because those entry points can come from without or within, attack surface management breaks into two parts:
Internal Attack Surface Management: By automating the process of mitigating vulnerabilities, teams can prevent lateral attack path movement, reduce insider threat risks, improve operational efficiency, and free up security teams for high-value tasks.
External Attack Surface Management (EASM): EASM guards the “front door” of an enterprise’s attack surface: APIs, websites, public cloud infrastructure, internet-facing assets and third-party tools.
By leveraging tools like cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM), large organizations get a single view of all threats – internal and external – that could compromise their digital assets.
Automation
Attackers are hitting companies where it hurts – speed, or lack thereof. According to ReliaQuest analysis reported in Forbes, the time it takes attackers to move laterally to a compromised system has sped up by 22% to rest at a mere 48 minutes on average.
“This quicker infiltration leaves organizations with even less time to respond,” notes cyber threat researcher Irene Fuentes McDonnell, “making automated defenses crucial in matching—and surpassing—the speed of adversaries.” Automating the identification, prioritization, and remediation of attack surface threats is necessary for enterprises to respond to quicker attacks at scale.
Agentic AI - Not Generative AI
While Generative AI has uses in cybersecurity, it can’t act independently. The benefit of Agentic AI is that it does not require constant manual prompts. It can act like a seasoned threat hunter at the top of their game, bringing everything that generative AI has to offer to the table, along with the ability to act without constant commands.
Infusing agentic AI into an exposure management process eliminates Tier 1 and Tier 2 tasks, so teams can take on more threats in real-time.
5 Stages of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)
The process of exposure management happens through the five-stage mechanism of continuous threat exposure management. CTEM is a repeated process that security teams can use to systematically find and reduce attack surface threats.
1. Scoping
Enterprises decide which critical assets and infrastructure segments will be included in the scope of the CTEM program. An exposure management outlook demands that these decisions be made based on business priorities, not siloed security objectives. Consider a small scope the first time through: the narrower the focus, the easier it is to demonstrate value to stakeholders.
2. Discovery
At the Discovery phase, both assets and their associated cyber risks are uncovered. This includes unearthing common vulnerabilities and exposed endpoints, end-of-life (EOL) systems and Shadow IT, lingering employee accounts, and more.
3. Prioritization
During Prioritization, discovered exposure risks are put into context and ranked based on three key elements:
Business Impact: How their exploitation would affect the overall wellbeing of the company in terms of bottom line, reputational damage, and operational downtime.
Likelihood of Exploitation: How likely these assets or exposures are to be exploited in the first place.
Strength of Current Security Controls: How effective are current cybersecurity measures against potential attacks?
4. Validation
One-time assessments can’t protect against evolving threats. Validation provides constant reassurance that the cybersecurity measures you have in place are still doing their job. This takes the form of:
Automated breach-and-attack (BAS) simulations
Automated testing, reporting, and feedback loops
Detection engineering that ensures rules filter out false positives
5. Mobilization
Mobilization is where the rubber hits the road and all your hard-fought data gets turned into action. This can include:
Creating automated task flows
Assigning teams and delegating responsibility
Procuring budget if needed
Implementing dashboards to track progress
Tracking solutions to ensure effectiveness
All steps lead up to this one. Mobilization is the crowning achievement of any CTEM program, and it can be easy or hard depending on the exposure management platform you have in place.
Advanced Exposure Management with GreyMatter Discover
ReliaQuest GreyMatter is built on the core principles of CTEM, but with a path for analysts to take action. Unlike traditional CAASM and exposure management tools that operate in silos with limited visibility and actionability, GreyMatter Discover is part of the GreyMatter security operations platform. This connection gives Discover access to more data sources, providing greater visibility and richer context. It also means it can go beyond just surfacing exposures to empower security teams to take immediate action—all within a single, unified platform.
FAQs
What is Exposure Management in Cybersecurity?
Exposure management (EM) in cybersecurity is the process of keeping tabs on all assets within your organization and reducing your attack surface.
What is the difference between Vulnerability Management and Exposure Management?
Exposure management is the umbrella under which vulnerability management now rests. While vulnerability management focuses on weaknesses in applications and systems, exposure management identifies those plus every additional point of weakness on an enterprise attack surface - and it looks at it through the lens of business impact.
What are the 5 Stages of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)?
1. Scoping – Outline which critical assets and infrastructures segments will be included in the scope of the CTEM program based on business priorities, not just security objectives.
2. Discovery - Both assets and their associated cyber risks are uncovered. This includes unearthing common vulnerabilities and exposed endpoints, end-of-life (EOL) systems and Shadow IT, lingering employee accounts, and more.
3. Prioritization - Discovered exposure risks are put into context and ranked based on business impact, likelihood of exploitation, and strength of current security controls.
4. Validation - Validation provides constant reassurance that the cybersecurity measures you have in place are still doing their job.
5. Mobilization – Where all your data finally meets action. This can include creating automated task flows, assigning teams and delegating responsibility, producing necessary budget, implementing dashboards to track progress, and more.
What are the Key Principles of Exposure Management?
Asset and Risk Discovery: Asset discovery is key to mapping the attack surface and identifying exposed resources because you can only protect what you can see.
Risk Assessment: Probe your mapped assets for weaknesses. At this stage potential threats are weighed, measured, and analyzed.
Prioritizing Exposures: After getting the rundown on which assets are carrying which risks, it is time to prioritize remediation efforts on the most severe ones first. The right exposure management platform can automatically do this for you.
Mitigating Threats: With the data you’ve collected, tackle threats by potential impact.
Continuous Monitoring: Threats are always going to reappear. An exposure management program must be repeated on a constant loop to provide consistent coverage against today’s persistent adversaries.
