Page 212 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

unchecked diffusion of organisational assets. This transformation, far from simplifying the defensive
mandate, has proliferated an ecosystem of so-called ‘shadow assets’-

• Cloud accounts established for development purposes yet never decommissioned,
• Legacy endpoint devices no longer maintained, yet still connected,
• Outmoded websites, orphaned domains, and user accounts surviving the offboarding of
employees.

Gartner’s recent research foregrounds this reality, highlighting that shadow and low-priority assets now
underpin many initial breach vectors, frequently exploited as the attackers’ first foothold. Such assets,
though trivial to internal custodians, present open invitations to the adversary.

Incidents from the preceding two years reaffirm this paradigm shift. Sophisticated ransomware
infiltrations, for instance, typically trace their origin to dormant endpoints or neglected third-party links.
Even an unpatched cloud server, omitted from routine sweeps, has acted as the very entry point for data
exfiltration at several multinational enterprises. These occurrences are ceasing to be statistical
anomalies; they are fast becoming orthodoxy.

The Shortcomings of Traditional Risk Frameworks
Conventional approaches to vulnerability management—predicated on severity hierarchies and
compliance tabulations, no longer suffice in this emerging risk landscape. Scheduled vulnerability scans
may identify risks of high or critical importance, yet continue to disregard those assets which fall outside
formal inventories.

This oversight can have dire consequences. Attackers frequently aggregate minor exposures, a forgotten
virtual machine, an abandoned SaaS subscription, stale credentials, to construct consequential privilege
escalation and lateral movement, breaches that static or periodic risk exercises are ill-equipped to predict.

Continuous Threat Exposure Management - A Standard Shift

Security leaders are responding by embracing Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) as the
new essential. Differentiating itself from legacy paradigms, CTEM represents not merely a technological
innovation, but an operational discipline, one that brings end-to-end visibility, validation, and business-
relevant risk prioritisation to every corner of the digital estate.

Gartner defines the key requirements of an effective CTEM programme as follows-

• Comprehensive scope: Inclusion of all assets—legacy, cloud, shadow, and third-party.
• Incessant discovery and profiling: Constant detection to ensure new assets are swiftly
catalogued and assessed.
• Business impact prioritisation: Assigning remediation urgency not by technical gravity alone,
but by potential effects on business continuity and data integrity.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 212
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