Vulnerability management is dead. Long live exposure management

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At the dawn of the internet age, when endpoint devices stayed on-prem and the network perimeter was physically defined, managing software vulnerabilities was simple. You learned of flaws and bugs, you patched them, and that was it.

Today, the perimeter is everywhere and nowhere. Devices authorized and unauthorized wander in and out of your network. You subscribe to rather than install software. Half your assets live on other companies' servers, and half your workforce dials in from home.

Times have certainly changed. And in many cases, so has vulnerability management. The old pattern of detect-patch-repeat doesn't cut it anymore, and vulnerability management has had to evolve.

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"Simply performing a vulnerability assessment that generates a large list of vulnerabilities may satisfy compliance requirements, but it will not lead to improved security posture," stated a Gartner white paper in November 2024. "Organizations must quickly reduce exposure to make their public-facing assets less visible and accessible."

Because the attack surface has expanded so much, the system for fixing weaknesses also had to expand. Beyond patching software flaws, it now spots and fixes misconfigurations of cloud assets, detects and blocks compromised credentials for SaaS applications, trims excessive access permissions, sandboxes BYOD, IoT and OT devices, and protects AI agents from malicious prompts and corrupted data.

This protection now starts before vulnerabilities are disclosed, detecting and proactively fixing potential problems and attack vectors before they can be exploited. And because it's become impossible to fix all possible flaws, this system can assess and categorize them in terms of risk.

This broadened protective umbrella is called exposure management or continuous threat exposure management (CTEM), and it's the naturally adapted next stage of vulnerability management as it keeps up with changing technologies and business priorities.

"[Exposure management] expands to cover your entire attack surface, including all digital assets and identities, and all forms of preventable risk like common vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and excessive permissions," says a Tenable guide to exposure management.

The missing link: risk-based vulnerability management

The intermediate step in the journey from traditional vulnerability management to exposure management is risk-based vulnerability management, or RBVM.

RBVM arose because the addition of cloud assets, online applications and mobile devices to the attack surface generated such a massive flood of alerts and potential avenues for exploit that security teams and their tools were overwhelmed.

"We spend our lives chasing down vulnerabilities and issuing (or responding to) mandates like, 'Patch within 30 days' or 'Code red, patch now!'" wrote Jorge Orchilles, Senior Director of Readiness and Proactive Security at Verizon, in a recent blog post for Tenable. "But as attack surfaces grow and threat actors become more sophisticated, this reactive approach has become inadequate."

A different approach was needed. Aided by machine learning, RBVM analyzes, assesses and ranks vulnerabilities and other flaws according to their likelihood of being exploited and the potential impact of that exploitation. With RVBM, security teams and company leadership can decide which threats and weaknesses to fix first, which to put on the back burner, and which to ignore.

"Not every vulnerability needs to be patched immediately," explains Orchilles. "Sure, it can be a hard thing to wrap your head around. But when everything is critical, nothing is critical."

From RVBM to exposure management

Exposure management takes this prioritization process a step further. It doesn't just make educated guesses about which weaknesses are most likely to be exploited. It uses automated or manual penetration testing to validate that a particular flaw can truly be exploited and become part of an attack vector.

Validation "takes prioritization to a deeper level of context" because it "verifies [vulnerability] impact on the organization's environment, specifically with all the complicated nuances that modern security testing may miss," says the Gartner white paper.

Not only does this process fine-tune the list of the most crucial mitigations to be made, but it can also then return later and verify that the applied fixes indeed work. 

"It's critical to start with the highest risk exposures, such as those with domain privileges, external-facing systems, or assets connected to critical attack paths, then work down from critical to low exposure," writes Lindsay Schwartz, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Tenable Vulnerability Management, Web App Scanning and Public Sector. "This target approach ensures resources are focused where they can have the greeted impact, faster."

The bonuses of a unified approach

There are other benefits to exposure management. Because an exposure-management platform gathers together the most important aspects of cloud security, network security, endpoint security and identity access and management, it provides a security team with a holistic, unified view across their organization's entire system.

This gives the team members greater visibility and lets them spot potentially malicious links between incidents and alerts in ways that might not have been possible in a more fragmented environment.

"By breaking down data silos and integrating insights from multiple security tools, organizations can reduce the likelihood of a breach and minimize risk exposure across the attack surface," writes Hadar Landau, Product Marketing Manager at Tenable. "Instead of viewing risks in isolation, security teams can connect the dots — understanding how attackers see their environment and taking smarter, more proactive action to reduce exposure."

Speaking of alert noise, security teams will experience less of it with an exposure-management platform as it eliminates the duplication of multiple tools sounding alerts over the same issue. It will also present data and anomalies in a consistent way, jettisoning the variety of metrics and interfaces that security teams must learn to comprehend when using tools from dozens of vendors.

"With the ability to separate the signal from the noise, you can move beyond simple vulnerability queries and start investigating complex, multi-domain risk scenarios," states a Tenable blog post. "Plus, you'll be able to prioritize the list of truly critical exposures so that your IT and dev teams will have a manageable workload."

Perhaps most importantly, exposure management works best when it is aligned with the overall goals of the organization. Does fixing a particular flaw help the company's business needs? Or will the mitigation be too costly or ineffective?

"Many security operations managers focus too much on discovering issues without evaluating their impact on the business," states the Gartner white paper. "Adding a business context, such as asset value and impact of compromise, to exposure management activities can improve senior leadership engagement."

The true key to exposure management is to adopt a new mindset toward digital security, making it a priority that involves everyone in the organization and to also take a proactive rather than reactive approach, identifying, analyzing and fixing — or choosing not to fix — potentially critical flaws.

"Security isn't just about identifying vulnerabilities; it's about understanding them in context," writes Landau in a different blog post. "A weakness might seem low priority on a dashboard but could pose a serious risk when connected to other issues. On the other hand, weaknesses that don't pose a real existential threat to the organization can be flagged as critical, flooding teams with alerts that are hard to prioritize."

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