Last updated at Wed, 07 May 2025 13:00:00 GMT

We live in a world where traditional Vulnerability Management (VM) has become infosec’s version of ‘whack-a-mole’— an attempt to tackle risks that constantly shift, multiply, and morph. As organizations push workloads to the cloud, offer customers digital experiences, or as they build AI-enabled applications across  their business, the attack surface expands exponentially. For decades, security teams have relied on traditional network and endpoint-based scanners to discover and patch CVEs, but the reality is attackers don’t think in terms of “CVEs”—they think in attack paths.

The most successful hackers increase the blast radius and impact of their attacks by connecting key dots across your organization:

  • Weak access controls to high-privilege users.
  • Misconfigurations to mission-critical assets.
  • Known exploits to number of impacted systems.

To tame this complicated, quickly-evolving threat landscape, security teams are moving from ticking boxes for vulnerabilities patched, to understanding, contextualizing, and preempting real-world threats before they become breaches. The strategic shift has fueled the rise of Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) and Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM).

However, many organizations implement these approaches through an array of point security solutions - vulnerability scanners, endpoint detection software, penetration testing - and feed this data into one or more aggregation tools (usually SIEMs). This fragmented approach has inadvertently paved the way for tool sprawl, operational silos, and security blind spots. In this blog, I’ll explore why RBVM and CTEM have become essential security strategies, common mistakes that organizations make in implementation, and why these shortcomings have fueled the demand for unified exposure management.

RBVM helps teams prioritize remediation based on exploitability, criticality, and threat intelligence, rather than relying solely on CVE severity scores. RBVM solutions typically ingest data from vulnerability scanners, external threat feeds, endpoint detection systems, and other security tools. Security analysts then correlate key findings against SIEM tools to determine which vulnerabilities are actively being exploited in their environment.

The key benefit? This approach reduces alert noise because it filters out low-risk vulnerabilities, enabling security teams to focus remediation efforts on the most critical threats.

However, RBVM approaches come with significant drawbacks:

  • RBVM tools are not designed to perform scans or produce threat intel themselves.
  • Teams must integrate RBVM solutions into their existing security stack (SIEM, SOAR, EDR, cloud security tools) - a process that’s often complex, time-consuming, and costly.
  • Most critically, if there are assets that the RVBM services have no visibility into, they will not produce risk scores for them, creating an incomplete picture of your attack surface and inaccurate representation of true business threats.

The evolution to CTEM

To continuously assess and validate exposures across the entire attack surface, organizations are turning to CTEM as a proactive strategy for mitigating ongoing risk. With real-time, continuous visibility into the attack surface and attack paths, security teams can prioritize remediation efforts based on the risks that impact business-critical systems. Despite the benefits of this more advanced approach, implementing CTEM with fragmented security tools creates significant challenges:

Misleading view of the attack surface.

Your security stack may have top-tier vulnerability scanners, EDR solutions, and CSPM tools, but if these tools aren’t talking to each other, you end up with an incomplete view of the attack paths that hackers would take. Leading CTEM approaches are underpinned by platforms that go beyond CVEs by incorporating misconfigurations, cloud entitlements, shadow IT, lateral movement risks, and application security gaps to provide a comprehensive view of the attack surface.

Lacking business content and impact analysis for prioritization.

Security teams have to sort through alerts, false positives, and vulnerability scan results that often lack business context. Without a unified platform connecting vulnerability findings with risk scores and business impact, teams will struggle to accurately prioritize risk, leaving them spending valuable time remediating issues that do not actually impact business-critical systems. Organizations need to look across the entire attack surface, including internal and external-facing attack vectors, as well as telemetry signals like weak identity and access controls.

Silos hinder incident response.

Vulnerability dashboards and reports do not depict how an adversary would exploit a vulnerability. Organizations need an in-depth view of the attack path to understand, for example, how misconfigurations can result in disruptive domain compromise in the event of a breach. This insight helps security teams identify interconnected systems and organizational peers (e.g., application owners, cloud architects, developers, engineers, etc.) that they will need to coordinate with in case there is a breach.

The driving force for a unified exposure management platform

According to the 2023 Gartner® Technology Adoption Roadmap for Large Enterprises Survey, cybersecurity leaders indicated that on average their organizations had 43 tools in their cybersecurity product portfolios, and 5% of the leaders indicated their organizations had over 100 tools.” We believe that managing that many tools can be overwhelming, especially because security teams often operate their tools in silos. The ensuing sprawl creates blind spots that attackers can easily exploit. Instead of juggling multiple disconnected tools, forward-thinking organizations are embracing a unified approach to exposure management with comprehensive platforms that deliver:

  • Vulnerability management
  • CASM
  • EASM
  • Cloud security
  • Identity security
  • Threat intelligence

Because many high-profile breaches start with compromised credentials or excessive privileges, the ideal exposure management platform maps critical assets against users with weak authentication protocols.

Security teams can no longer rely on a scan-and-patch approach; they need to stay ahead of attackers by continuously identifying, validating, and mitigating risks across the entire attack surface. If your security tools aren’t fully integrated, attackers will exploit what’s left exposed. CISOs, security architects, and SOC leaders are tackling this challenge by moving beyond traditional VM and adopting a unified exposure management strategy with Rapid7’s Exposure Command Platform.

Connecting the dots with Exposure Command

Unlike traditional standalone VM, CASM, EASM, SIEM, or EDR tools that rely on proprietary agents, Exposure Command from Rapid7 brings it all together into one platform. With an inside-out and outside-in view of your risks, combined with trusted threat intelligence and a vendor agnostic approach to vulnerability aggregation, security teams gain a complete, end-to-end view of their attack surface.

Rapid7’s all-in-one Exposure Command platform goes even further by automatically mapping users, authentication protocols, and the criticality of the systems they can access. Armed with deep visibility into vulnerabilities and their impact to the business, organizations can leverage Rapid7’s Remediation Hub to address the risks that have the largest impact on their overall risk posture.

The paradigm has shifted - it’s no longer about chasing vulnerability patches, but about taking command and reducing risk across the business.

Ready to see the difference a unified approach can make? Check out the Rapid7 Exposure Command product trial to learn more about our platform and dive deeper into our unified, modern approach to managing risk and remediating security threats.

Gartner, Infrastructure Security Primer for 2025, John Watts, Franz Hinner, 29 January 2025 (For Gartner subscribers only)

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