As businesses digitally transform faster than ever, cyber threats are evolving equally rapidly. The attack surface has changed from a well-defined network perimeter to a surface that includes multiple data centers, co-location centers, public and private clouds, remote offices and a globally diverse workforce operating from home offices. In addition, bad actors have adopted technology such as AI and machine learning (ML) to orchestrate attacks across this expanded attack surface to rapidly scale. Given this new dynamic, organizations need new tools to detect, assess, and remediate operational risk, data threats and security breaches. One trending framework is continuous threat exposure management (CTEM), which enterprises are implementing to determine attack surface exposure and prioritize risk mitigation.

CTEM is a platform to scope, discover, and prioritize risk to an organization. It can be quite beneficial as a process to remove vulnerabilities before an attacker can find and exploit them. Therefore, new threat exposure management frameworks will continue to be a priority for enterprises.

However, this is not a single approach that removes the need to detect active threats. Threat monitoring and detection, such as Network Detection and Response (NDR), provide a complement to enhance a threat exposure management strategy. While CTEM discovers vulnerabilities, NDR will discover threats in progress. Managing the priority of “what-if” risk mitigation versus the “right-now” active threat response is necessary for security teams.

Why NDR and CTEM are Complementary Frameworks

The goal of CTEM technology is to identify risks and vulnerabilities, prioritize them based on business impact, and mitigate the risk. CTEM can be thought of as a “left of boom” practice to reduce the chances of a future attack. However, CTEM is not a technology to monitor communications to identify active threats.

NDR technology focuses the analysis of packet data in network traffic to identify active threats.

For NDR to be successful, packet probes need to gain access to the internal and external communication paths that are most interesting to attackers and most damaging to an enterprise. Essentially, enterprise networks can’t be protected against threats that aren’t seen. While that might seem like a simple concept, it’s challenging to accomplish since today’s enterprise networks are a complex mix of legacy networks, branch offices, home offices, plus private and public clouds. NDR solutions give enterprises comprehensive network visibility that is broad and visible across an entire digital infrastructure and deep down to the packet level.

Enabling Security Teams to Quickly Identify Threats

Most importantly, NDR provides network context – which is crucial for gaining the big-picture perspective of active threats, enabling security teams to quickly identify the threat and plan a response. In doing so, overall security capabilities are heightened, and there is a natural, increase of detection and mitigation of threats. When powered by network packet data, NDR toolkits can provide real-time attack surface monitoring, early warning capabilities, contact tracing, and back-in-time analysis to locate bad actors and malicious traffic within the network.

Networks will be breached. That is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.’ A security team that invests in CTEM technology will lower the likelihood of an attack, making it more difficult for adversaries. Yet, it is not a foolproof technology and monitoring of live data cannot be replaced by risk mitigation technology. As networks become more complicated and threat actors become more sophisticated in their initial access, discovery, and lateral movement techniques, the network remains a strategic vantage point to protect a business from cyberattacks. Because of this, it is in the best interest of network security teams to think through the comprehensive solutions available to mitigate future business compromise.

Highly scalable and packet-based NDR solutions complement those investing in CTEM. It’s a combination of the forward-looking CTEM for risk mitigation combined with the constant monitoring of network communications to identify active threats provided by NDR. It provides the data required to fortify the network against future attacks as well as identify current attacks. When combined, the cybersecurity stack, staff, and overall cybersecurity posture will be more efficient at mitigating threat exposure and active threats.