Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

Build Attacker Centric Remediation Approach

What is CTEM?

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a comprehensive security strategy that combines external attack surface management with automated penetration testing and red teaming. It aims to provide continuous discovery, active validation, and risk prioritization to manage cybersecurity exposure effectively. CTEM helps organizations identify vulnerabilities, validate risks, and prioritize remediation efforts. The goal is to enhance asset coverage, increase the frequency of penetration testing, rapidly identify risks, and reduce security operation costs, ensuring a robust defense against evolving cyber threats.

Challenges with Traditional Threat Exposure Management

Too many Alerts and False Positives

Conventional methods probe too many alerts and about 40% false positives, causing alert fatigue resulting in important risks being unattended.

Lack of Testing & Validation

Traditional methods rely on annual or bi-annual assessments, leaving vulnerabilities unaddressed for long periods.

Fragmented Approach

Disjointed Vulnerability Assessment (VA) and Penetration Testing (PT) lack the agility to prevent automated attacks effectively.

FireCompass CTEM – Combining CTEM with Active Testing & Validation

Continuous Discovery

FireCompass EASM helps organizations uncover their entire external attack surface, crucial for defining their CTEM program’s scope. By continuously sending probes, capturing banners, fingerprinting services, and attributing contextually, FireCompass identifies assets associated with the organization. This includes domains, subdomains, IP addresses, services, service banners, web application pages, and public code, creating a searchable, extensive graph of entities and their interrelations.

Active & Passive EASM

FireCompass combines passive and active external attack surface management (EASM) for comprehensive asset identification and monitoring. Passive reconnaissance gathers data stealthily from sources like WHOIS records and search engines, while active reconnaissance uses probes and service fingerprinting to identify assets. This approach creates a detailed, searchable graph of domains, subdomains, IPs, services, web app pages, and public code, ensuring thorough mapping and monitoring of the attack surface.

Active Testing & Validation

The FireCompass platform assists organizations in uncovering both visible and hidden threats through playbooks designed to test various scenarios on your attack surface. It reveals hidden assets using advanced attribution techniques and employs Multi-Stage Hunting Playbooks to execute over 30,000 attacks and checks across network, web, cloud, and other assets via a geographically distributed sensor network. The platform conducts continuous risk hunting with playbooks that identify critical risks within 24-72 hours and sends alerts.

Credential and Data Leak Monitoring

FireCompass enables automatic scanning for leaked credentials and sensitive data across the web, including technical data, source code, and secrets. This proactive approach helps identify sensitive data leaks early, preventing potential data breaches before malicious actors can exploit them. The platform alerts organizations when credentials are exposed or compromised, enabling immediate action to prevent unauthorized access.

Dark Web Data Leaks

The platform provides comprehensive dark web monitoring to detect data leaks, scanning hidden forums, marketplaces, and other dark web sources. FireCompass identifies any organizational data being sold or discussed, offering critical insights into potential threats. This continuous monitoring helps organizations anticipate cyber threats and take proactive measures to protect against substantial business and financial losses

Prioritizing & Validating Threats

CTEM proposes to prioritize risks based on various factors such as urgency, availability of security controls, and exploitability from the attacker’s perspective. FireCompass orchestrates various playbooks to identify critical vulnerabilities along with attack paths. It also performs active validation of passive risks by performing active fingerprinting, probing, and sending CVE-specific payloads. Active validation helps organizations eliminate false positives from passive risks. The platform simulates adversaries to identify low-hanging attacker-exposed assets.

FireCompass Featured In Gartner® Hype Cycle For Automated Penetration Testing And Red Teaming 2023

FireCompass Advantages

Enhanced Asset Coverage

Discover all assets, known and unknown, cloud asset or on-premise asset, to make sure nothing is overlooked.

Increased Testing Frequency

Enable continuous testing for ongoing monitoring and detection, so that new vulnerabilities are quickly identified and addressed.

Reduced Risk Exposure

Close the window of vulnerability and reduce the time during which your organization is exposed to potential threats using continuous monitoring.

Cost Efficiency

Reduce the reliance on manual testing through automation, subsequently lowering costs significantly while increasing the thoroughness and frequency of assessments.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of Continuous Automated Pentesting with FireCompass?

FireCompass Continuous Automated Pentest enables enterprises to elevate their bi-annual Pentest exercises to a monthly frequency, while simultaneously ensuring 100% of assets are covered in each automated Pentest cycle. It offers 5x the benefits compared to employing additional resources for conducting traditional pen tests monthly. Additionally, the FireCompass Platform features a Continuous Threat Monitoring mode that identifies the most critical risks within 72 hours, significantly reducing the overall exposure window of a critical vulnerability.

What compliance standards are required in a Continuous Automated Pentesting?

Continuous monitoring and penetration testing are beneficial for organizations regardless of their need to comply with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI. These practices can help avoid the substantial penalties associated with breaches by enhancing security, even for entities not subject to specific compliance requirements. Continuous automated penetration testing, in particular, plays a crucial role in maintaining robust security measures.

How does an Automated Penetration Test differ from an Automated Vulnerability Scan?

An Automated Penetration Test attempts to exploit vulnerabilities to prioritize their remediation. In contrast, an Automated Vulnerability Scan merely identifies CVEs and vulnerabilities in an asset, assigning scores based on static CVSS metrics. An Automated Penetration Test also uncovers a series of attack steps, known as attack trees, which may involve CVEs, authentication attacks, web application vulnerabilities, process injection, lateral movements, etc. This approach helps to minimize noise and alert fatigue, and it uncovers new attack paths that vulnerability scanning might miss.

What should we expect from the FireCompass Continuous Automated Pentesting?

With FireCompass Continuous Automated Pentesting, organizations can expect thorough monthly automated penetration tests covering 100% of assets to identify vulnerabilities. It includes continuous daily monitoring for Critical Vulnerability Exposures (CVEs) with immediate alerts for critical threats. Additionally, users gain access to a comprehensive portal featuring detailed reports, a real-time dashboard, and over 100 tailored attack playbooks designed to address specific vulnerabilities on your attack surface, enhancing your cybersecurity posture significantly.

How often should we conduct an automated Continuous Automated Pentest?

FireCompass Automated Continuous Pentest is performed monthly on 100% of your assets to uncover recent and new exploitable vulnerabilities. Additionally, the platform features a continuous Day 1 CVE monitoring mode, which identifies and alerts you to newly published CVE exposures within 72 hours.

How much time is required to perform a typical Automated Pentest?

An Automated Pentest typically requires 3 to 15 days to cover 100% of assets, encompassing different types of network and web assets, with the duration varying based on the size of the attack surface. The scheduling of tests is designed to minimize the impact on the performance of your services and web applications. In certain instances, Automated Pen tests may throttle testing to ensure the impact on your attack surface remains minimal.

I already have a vendor conducting yearly Pen Testing, do I need a Continuous Pen Testing solution?

Are you struggling with Alert Fatigue from Scanners or threat intel feeds?
Is your pentest vendor able to cover 100% of assets? As per our research, a typical pentest just covers 20% of assets
Are you worried about breaches and ransomware in your industry?
Is your industry highly regulated and compliance-driven? There can be hefty fines in case of non-compliance

Then Continuous Automated Pentesting can help your organization to cover all the above concerns, and improve the overall security posture of your organization.

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Build your security with the best

FireCompass is a SaaS platform for Continuous Automated Pen Testing, Red Teaming and External Attack Surface Management (EASM) that acts as an integral part of a good exposure management program.

Single Platform for Attack Surface Management and Automated Penetration Testing & Red Team
Daily Risk Port Scanning & Adversary Emulation through multiple Attack Playbooks
Prioritized Risks with real-time alerts for faster detection and remediation

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“The tool has exceeded our expectations”

– Risk Manager, Top 3 Telecom in USA