Vulnerability management is an integral part of your cybersecurity strategy. It helps you discover, identify, assess, correct (or accept), and monitor system vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit.
Prioritize High-Risk Vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit and can give threat actors privileged control should be remediated first. This includes resolving vulnerabilities in production systems and development and test environments.
Effective vulnerability prioritization ensures teams save time and resources on non-critical issues while neglecting severe threats. It involves assessing the risk to business operations and sensitive data and considering compliance requirements and the evolving nature of the cyber risk landscape.
Vulnerabilities are evaluated and prioritized using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) industry standard. The assessment includes factors such as severity, asset impact, and potential for exploitation. This allows teams to quickly and efficiently reduce security risks across the enterprise. The CVSS score also helps organizations understand their level of exposure and identify areas where they may need to increase protections or apply patches.
Automate the Scanning Process
Vulnerability management aims to identify IT systems, networks, and software security flaws before cybercriminals exploit them. This can include hardware vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi access points, misconfigured servers, and application weaknesses.
Vulnerability scanning tools are not infallible and should not be relied upon as a single method of protecting against threats. Attackers can easily bypass IPS systems and other protections to access vulnerable systems.
The modern threat landscape requires that organizations have a complete view of their attack surface to detect and remediate risks quickly. Performing periodic scans is insufficient as the threat landscape changes rapidly. Consider deploying automated vulnerability scanners to ensure complete coverage of your IT environment. This approach also speeds up mitigation cycles.
Remediate Vulnerabilities Promptly
Identified vulnerabilities must be either remedied or mitigated to minimize risk. Whereas mitigation adopts a proactive stance to lessen the possibility of exploitation when it is not practical to stop a vulnerability from occurring, remediation eliminates the threat.
Vulnerability management requires a team effort. To make it work, it’s essential to establish clear roles and responsibilities for security teams and their counterparts in other departments.
It’s also vital to utilize technologies that enable organizations to prioritize assets, detect vulnerabilities, and remediate threats promptly.
Establish Well-Defined Metrics
Vulnerability management involves more than scanning for vulnerabilities and patching them. It also entails monitoring vulnerability metrics, which help IT teams prioritize and reduce the risk of cybersecurity threats and attacks.
Metrics provide a clear, objective score based on a vulnerability’s impact and exploitability, which helps you make more informed decisions about prioritizing vulnerabilities. Other metrics, such as scan coverage and the average number of vulnerabilities per asset, provide a more granular look at your vulnerability detection.
Metrics are essential for elevating security awareness within the organization so that all teams understand the risks they face and how to manage them. A well-established program for gathering metrics can also help you create a business case to support your vulnerability management initiative.
Automate Reporting
Vulnerability management is a vital part of any comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. It’s the continuous process of identifying, classifying, prioritizing, and remediating software insecurities and misconfigurations in IT infrastructure and applications.
A successful vulnerability management program requires a team effort. This isn’t just the responsibility of the IT and cybersecurity teams — dev, engineering, operations, compliance, and other stakeholders also need to work together to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities and remediate them quickly.
Automation can help with this. It can remove the human element from most vulnerability management tasks, enabling teams to scan assets more often and reduce the time it takes to fix issues. This will help organizations meet compliance standards, minimize attack surfaces, and improve operational resiliency.
