Exposure Management Cybersecurity: Why Security Leaders Must Think Like Attackers
Exposure Management Cybersecurity: Why Security Leaders Must Think Like Attackers
Publish Date: 2026-06-02 11:24:00
Source Domain: nationalcioreview.com
Cybersecurity teams have spent years strengthening defenses, deploying new tools, and refining vulnerability management programs.
Yet breaches continue to occur with alarming frequency.
According to Dhiyva Poole, Gartner Sr Director Analyst, the reason may be surprisingly simple: organizations still do not see themselves the way attackers do.
Speaking at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2026, Poole challenged security leaders to rethink traditional approaches to cyber risk by adopting an attacker-centric view of their environments.
They’re not looking to break in where you’re strongest. They’re looking where you’re unaware.
The Attack Surface Is Bigger Than Most Organizations Realize
Poole cited Gartner research showing that organizations often underestimate their attack surface by as much as 30 percent.
The gaps are rarely found in critical systems already receiving significant attention from security teams. Instead, attackers are increasingly targeting forgotten infrastructure, unmanaged assets, legacy applications, exposed cloud services, and abandoned domains.
For attackers, these overlooked assets represent opportunity.
“They are not looking for one big weakness,” Poole explained. “They build attacks over time by connecting multiple exposures together.”
The challenge for organizations is that many of these exposures appear insignificant when viewed individually. However, when combined, they can create a clear path to critical systems and sensitive data.
From Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management
A central theme of the presentation was the growing importance of Exposure Management as a strategic cybersecurity discipline.
Traditional vulnerability management often focuses on severity scores such as CVSS. Exposure management, by contrast, prioritizes risks based on how attackers would actually exploit them.
Poole outlined three core pillars:
1….
