You’ve read the Chronicles, maybe caught a webinar. While the theory sounds solid, with ideas like continuous visibility, prioritized risk, and collaboration between red and blue teams, there’s possibly one question you still have:
“What does this actually look like in a real organization like mine?”
You’ve seen plenty of frameworks crash and burn once they leave the slide deck. You’ve watched good security initiatives die slow deaths because they were too complex, too political, or just plain exhausting to maintain. So when someone tells you CTEM is a game-changer, skepticism is a reasonable response.
In this final episode of the CTEM Chronicles, you’ll step into the shoes of a fictional, but realistic, organization that made the decision to adopt CTEM. You’ll see what pushed them to act, what went wrong, what changed, and what they learned along the way.
By the end, you’ll have a better sense whether it’s the right move to adopt CTEM for your organization.
Let’s call them Lunera Capital, a mid-sized financial services firm with global operations and a growing digital footprint. They manage high-value transactions across borders, handle sensitive client data, and rely on a mix of modern cloud services and ageing on-prem infrastructure. Think mergers, trading desks, and investment arms. The kind of environment where uptime is critical and lots of regulatory requirements.
Their security team is smart, capable, and yet stretched thin.
They’ve got decent coverage: endpoint protection, vulnerability management, firewalls, and a smattering of threat intel feeds. But the reality is this. They operate in reactive mode 90% of the time. Alerts fly in. Tickets pile up. Patching happens when it can, not when it should.
Everyone knows there are gaps. They just don’t know how big they are.
Leadership sees cybersecurity as important, but not strategic. Until there’s a breach, a failed audit, or a compliance scare, the security team is left to quietly juggle priorities with limited visibility and even less influence.
So when CTEM came up during a leadership offsite, prompted by a Gartner report, it wasn’t met with much enthusiasm but with eye-rolls, “Great, another framework.”
But a seed had been planted.
For Lunera, the turning point wasn’t a breach, but an audit report they couldn’t explain away.
The internal risk team had run a quarterly controls audit focused on external exposure and patching cadence. When the findings landed, they triggered a moment of clarity and panic. Among the highlights:
But the worst part?
When the CIO asked the Head of Security, “So… how exposed are we, really?” the answer was a pause. Not because they didn’t care. But because, honestly, they didn’t know how to articulate it.
They had dashboards, spreadsheets, and weekly status meetings. What they lacked, and what CTEM promised, was a continuous, validated, business-aligned view of exposure. Not just what was vulnerable, but what was actually exploitable. Not just what existed, but what mattered.
That was the spark.
The security leadership team regrouped. CTEM wasn’t a silver bullet, but it might offer the organizing principle they’d been missing. A way to shift from overwhelmed to proactive prioritization.
They decided to run a pilot.
Lunera didn’t go all in from day one. They couldn’t afford to. So they started small, picking a known and common use case: their external attack surface.
They brought in a CTEM-aligned platform to map every internet-facing asset across the organization. Within days, it uncovered dozens of shadow IT assets. Exposed dev environments, forgotten web apps, misconfigured cloud S3 buckets. Things their existing tools had completely missed.
Lunera didn’t build a new team or overhaul its tech stack to start. They used existing tooling and repurposed internal team capacity for the validation work. It wasn’t about scale. It was about focus.
It was eye-opening, and honestly, a bit embarrassing.
Then came the harder part. What do you do with that data? Visibility was no longer the problem. Action was. Tickets were opened, but no one felt accountable. Teams pointed fingers. Some asked, “Is this really our risk?” Others just ignored the alerts.
Instead of shutting it down, the cybersecurity leader changed tack. They used the new visibility to start better conversations, not just to assign blame. Questions like:
The red team ran validation exercises. Not to catch teams out and point fingers, but to simulate how a real attacker would think and move. Exposure became something people could see and understand. A forgotten staging app led to admin credentials. A dev box offered a pivot into internal systems.
The conversation was changing. Visibility didn’t come from buying a new platform. It came from combining existing data sources and actually validating what was real. Even with a messy stack, they found clarity through validation, not volume.
Remediation stopped being just another ticket. It had business context. It reduced the signal to noise ratio. Engineering teams began to understand why these issues mattered. Not all of them, but enough to move things forward.
It was slow. Messy. Political.
But it felt different, security wasn’t yelling into the void, but collaborating with business unit leaders in a different way.
Not everyone bought in right away. Some teams felt exposed. Others saw it as just more noise from security. But over time, the teams who engaged started seeing fewer surprises and more clarity. That built quiet momentum.
Three months in, progress was steady but fragile. Some teams were engaged. Others still saw CTEM as a side project.
Then came a critical moment.
The red team was told to act like a real attacker, starting with external exposures. No rules of engagement. No safe zones. Just find a path.
And they did.
All of it happened in under five days.
When these findings were presented to the executive team, the impact was immediate. Not because they were technical, but because they were easy to understand. This wasn’t about CVSS scores. This was about real risk. Reputational damage. Regulatory fines. Customer trust.
CTEM stopped being a security project and became a business priority. The CIO backed it. Engineering and product were pulled in. The CISO got the green light to reallocate budget, not just for tools but for people and process.
Red and blue teams began working as one. Exposure validation became a normal part of operations. CTEM moved from test phase to operating model.
With support secured and results in hand, Lunera committed fully. CTEM became the structure behind their approach to cyber risk.
Exposure reviews happened every two weeks. New findings were validated, prioritized, and tracked. Security stopped reacting. They began planning ahead.
Every exposure had a clear owner across engineering, IT, or the business. CTEM insights led to real accountability which helped to cut down on the time to settle on
They didn’t add headcount. They clarified ownership using what they already had which helped reduce friction and decision fatigue across teams.
Red and blue teams worked together. Simulations ran continuously, and results fed straight into action. Even product and dev teams began asking security to weigh in earlier, because they finally understood what was at stake.
Collaboration between red and blue didn’t happen overnight. At first, there was friction, different goals, different language, and different priorities. But once both sides saw how their work fit into a shared objective, the tone shifted. The red team helped prove what mattered. The blue team helped fix what counted.
CTEM helped them ignore noise and focus on real, validated, business-impacting risks. That changed everything.
Cybersecurity stopped being just another control function. It became part of how the business protected its reputation and bottom line.
Six months in, Lunera operated differently.
They weren’t perfect, but they were sharper and more aligned, with clear views to critical risks.
Critical fixes that used to take weeks or months now took days. Teams knew what mattered and why and who was tasked with addressing it.
Executives no longer needed to decode security dashboards. CTEM gave them real-world risk stories, with clear progress, clear impact and a roadmap for what systems were next in the crosshairs.
Security stopped being a blocker. It became a partner. Developers understood the risks and made better decisions earlier in the lifecycle.
They didn’t try to patch everything. They patched what could be exploited and what truly mattered.
Lunera’s CTEM journey wasn’t perfect, and there were more than a few headaches changing the culture and existing processes, but it was improving.
It helped the business see risk clearly, prioritize with confidence, and drive security that made a difference.
They didn’t start with a transformation. They started with one project. That led to another. And momentum built.
Simulations showed what a real attack path looked like. That made the risk real, and helped get people on board.
CTEM wasn’t about buying another tool. It was about changing how they thought. From reacting to planning. From guessing to validating. On the surface, many of the elements (threat modelling, vulnerability management, pentesting) weren’t new. The difference was the cadence, the connectedness, and the constant validation that turned scattered efforts into a repeatable system.
Lunera is fictional, but their story is stitched together from dozens of real-world experiences. The challenges, the missteps, the slow cultural shifts these reflect what many teams are already navigating today.
If your teams are stretched, your tools are scattered, and leadership wants answers in a language you can’t confidently give, CTEM is certainly worth a look.
It helps you focus. It helps you prioritize. It helps you move from blind spots to visibility and from chaos to control.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “This would never work here,” you’re not alone. Most of the people who’ve successfully adopted CTEM started out just as doubtful. It’s not easy, not instant, and not perfect. But it is possible especially when you start small and adapt it to your reality, not someone else’s.
Start small. Map one path. Validate one exposure. Show one win.
Your program doesn’t need to be perfect to get better.
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