STOP GUESSING: Enforce Action with the Correlation Evidence Questionnaire (CEQ)
Resolve the Contextual Certainty Deficit with Legal-Grade Attribution.
For CISOs and TPRM leaders, relying on static, subjective security questionnaires is a dangerous structural flaw. These claims-based attestations provide only a "snapshot in time," leaving you vulnerable to threats that evolve hourly while forcing analysts to chase stale, generalized claims.
ThreatNG’s CEQ is the definitive evolution. Powered by our patent-backed Context Engine™, the CEQ fuses real-time external security findings with decisive legal, financial, and operational context.
The ThreatNG Difference:
Traditional Questionnaires ask questions to find the truth.
The CEQ already has the truth and asks questions to enforce action.
Reclaim Your Budget: Eliminate the Hidden Tax on the SOC
The highest hidden cost in security operations is the manual validation cycle. Security analysts lose countless hours chasing ambiguous findings, attempting to confirm whether a generalized policy gap is real, and tracking down asset owners.
The CEQ cuts the validation loop entirely by:
Generating inquiries only after the Context Engine™ confirms the exposure, ownership, and business impact.
Moving your team straight from Certainty Intelligence™ to targeted remediation.
Restoring valuable security budget previously wasted on administrative ambiguity.
Stop Managing Doubt: Enforce Policy with Legal-Grade Attribution
Executive credibility hinges on confidence. When reporting risk to the board or regulators, CISOs cannot afford to operate in the realm of doubt. The CEQ acts as your essential EASM-to-Audit Translation Layer, providing the definitive assurance needed to accelerate governance.
We supply Legal-Grade Attribution by:
Correlating technical flaws, such as a critical vulnerability or a Non-Human Identity (NHI) Exposure, with external realities.
Mapping verified risks directly to GRC mandates (GDPR/HIPAA) or SEC 8-K Filings.
Transforming technical noise into an irrefutable legal and financial imperative to justify security investments.
Move Beyond Claims-Based Attestation: Mandate Verified Vendor Action
The era of trusting vendor self-attestation is over. Traditional Vendor Risk Assessment Questionnaires (VRAQs) rely on subjective claims, introducing inherent bias into your supply chain risk management.
Deploy the CEQ as your standard for evidence-based vendor validation:
Dynamic Generation: We dynamically generate inquiries about specific, verified third-party exposures.
Precision-Driven Mandates: If a vendor has an F-rated Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility due to a dangling DNS record, the CEQ demands a timeline for removing that specific CNAME.
Auditable Action: Force remediation based on irrefutable evidence, not generalized promises.
Frequently Asked Questions: The Correlation Evidence Questionnaire (CEQ)
The Contextual Problem and Necessity
-
The CEQ is designed to resolve the pervasive Contextual Certainty Deficit. This deficit arises because risk management has historically relied on generalized, subjective documentation and self-attestation (known as claims-based attestation), which quickly becomes stale and unreliable. The CEQ replaces this flawed model by beginning with irrefutable, observed evidence of an existing risk before any question is asked.
-
Traditional VRAQs are fundamentally limited because they provide only a "snapshot in time" security posture, instantly becoming obsolete as external attack surfaces continuously evolve. Their generalized nature is disconnected from specific digital assets, leading to a pervasive "checkbox mentality" in which compliance is documented but actual vulnerabilities are often ignored or missed. Furthermore, managing these lengthy, manual workflows frequently causes resource-intensive bottlenecks that delay procurement cycles.
-
The Hidden Tax on the SOC is the significant time and budget drain incurred when security analysts must manually chase ambiguous findings, validate generalized claims, and spend resources attempting to correlate a technical finding with its actual business impact and responsible owner. By delivering Legal-Grade Attribution, which confirms the asset, exposure, and context upfront, the CEQ eliminates the manual validation burden, allowing analysts to move directly to targeted remediation and enforcement.
The Technology and Core Value Proposition
-
Legal-Grade Attribution is the gold standard of certainty achieved when a technical security finding is verified against decisive, non-technical context (legal, financial, and operational data). This is powered by the patent-backed Context Engine™, which uses Multi-Source Data Fusion to iteratively correlate raw external exposures—such as a critical vulnerability, an exposed port, or a leaked credential—with external public data like SEC 8-K Filings or publicly disclosed Lawsuits. This correlation transforms ambiguous findings into irrefutable, high-stakes mandates.
-
The CEQ is dynamically generated because its content is instantly tailored solely to the most recent, continuous discovery and assessment results captured by ThreatNG for a target organization. Instead of asking if an organization has a generic patching policy, the CEQ might ask: "Provide the remediation timeline for the specific unpatched vulnerability on the subdomain associated with the F-rated Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility risk". This hyper-targeted approach ensures every question addresses a validated, existing risk on the external attack surface.
-
The CEQ operationalizes complex governance metrics, such as the Non-Human Identity (NHI) Exposure Security Rating. When ThreatNG's Sensitive Code Exposure module discovers a high-privilege machine identity (such as a leaked API key or SSH key), the CEQ generates a direct mandate for the asset owner to confirm the incident response workflow and key rotation status, providing an auditable enforcement mechanism for these often-invisible credentials.
Operational and Efficiency Gains
-
The CEQ should be deployed as the standardized mechanism for evidence-based vendor validation. By forcing third parties to respond to hyper-specific inquiries about the exact external exposures contributing to a poor security rating, the CEQ eliminates the need for lengthy exchanges spent arguing over subjective scores. It demands concrete remediation steps against verified findings, streamlining due diligence, and strengthening the supply chain.
-
The CEQ ensures efficient cross-functional cooperation by structuring its hyper-specific inquiries across four business-critical pillars:
Technical: Focusing on configuration, exposure, and asset state (e.g., Are there missing security headers?).
Operational: Focusing on process, ownership, and procedure (e.g., Who is responsible for patching this subdomain?).
Strategic: Focusing on policy, governance, and business justification (e.g., Is there a business justification for exposing these sensitive ports?).
Financial: Focusing on budget, consequence, and investment justification (e.g., Is there a budget to purchase these typosquatted domains?).
-
ThreatNG’s capability includes rich vulnerability intelligence, integrating NVD (technical details), KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities), and EPSS (likelihood of exploitation). The CEQ uses this risk-based prioritization to generate questions only for exposures on assets confirmed to be vulnerable and potentially actively exploited, ensuring IT teams allocate resources to the highest-consequence threats, eliminating the need to chase low-priority Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs).
-
Against an adversary using automated reconnaissance to map your attack surface, legacy scans are too slow. By categorizing external findings into the functional pillars, the CEQ helps teams map the DarChain™ (External Contextual Attack Path Intelligence). This allows your organization to pinpoint exact Attack Choke Points, breaking the kill chain and moving defense timelines upstream before a strategic signal matures into a data breach.
Strategic Governance and CISO Value
-
The CEQ provides Legal-Grade Attribution, which translates esoteric technical risks into tangible business consequences. When correlating a finding with a financial or regulatory document, the CISO receives the irrefutable proof required to justify strategic investments and accelerate governance. It provides the assurance that external risk is managed with certainty, eliminating reliance on doubt when reporting organizational risk posture.
-
ThreatNG’s External GRC Assessment capability maps external risks directly to compliance frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST CSF. When the Context Engine™ correlates an exposed open cloud bucket (Data Leak Susceptibility) with a specific GRC control violation, the CEQ is generated to demand the documentation proving remediation for that specific control. This creates an auditable trail, ensuring every external finding has an auditable internal response attached.
-
Yes. The CEQ formalizes the response protocol for Digital Risk Protection (DRP) findings. When ThreatNG detects risks contributing to BEC & Phishing Susceptibility (e.g., missing DMARC/SPF records or the availability of brand-related typosquatted domains), the CEQ routes highly specific questions to the email, marketing, and legal teams, demanding policy validation and remediation steps against a verified brand or financial threat. For example, the CEQ may inquire: “Is there a budget to purchase these typosquatted domains?”.
Discover & Inventory
Continuous Visibility
Report & Share
Collaborate & Manage