No matter what kind of technology your business uses, vulnerabilities are inevitable. Identifying and managing them effectively requires a program that looks beyond simply patching systems.
A vulnerability management program needs to scale and be cyber-resilient to be effective. It also needs to align with existing security systems and processes.
Conduct Vulnerability Scans
Vulnerability scans identify possible exploits, security flaws, and system misconfigurations in a network. They can be limited to specific systems or comprehensive and encompass all IT assets. Scans can be unauthenticated or authenticated, with or without penetration testing.
In the case of unauthenticated scans, vulnerability assessment tools typically use threat intelligence and databases to identify devices, services, open ports, installed software, file systems, and more. Once identified, vulnerabilities can be rated for severity using a standard rating system like CVSS.
Information security and IT staff should prioritize vulnerabilities based on their business impact and ease of exploitation. This helps avoid wasting time and resources by fixing low-risk vulnerabilities unlikely to lead to a successful attack. The risk-based approach also makes balancing technical and business needs easier by running ongoing re-evaluations of exposed assets.
Create a Vulnerability Inventory
Building a vulnerability management program is essential to identifying, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure before cybercriminals exploit them. However, implementing a program requires agility and cyber-resilience to keep pace with an ever-changing threat landscape.
Effective vulnerability management starts with a comprehensive asset inventory. This includes computing systems, storage devices, networks, data types, and third-party systems connected to your IT ecosystem. Each asset should be assessed for its criticality and inherent risk, including logical connection to higher-classed assets, user access, and system availability.
Vulnerabilities can be classified by severity and ranked using CVSS, which can help you determine how big of an impact they could have if exploited. However, relying on severity ratings alone can present challenges because vulnerabilities may be exploitable without causing any damage and can be easily overlooked by opportunistic attackers.
Prioritize Vulnerabilities
It is essential to establish a consistent process for evaluating and prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their impact. This includes creating a set of criteria for assessing vulnerability severity in the context of your business operations.
Defining these criteria helps ensure that vulnerability priorities are aligned with your organization’s goals and risk tolerance levels. Ultimately, this allows you to balance security efforts with business needs so that you can prioritize fixing high-risk vulnerabilities first.
For example, you should consider whether threat actors can exploit a vulnerability to compromise mission-critical systems, steal sensitive data, or disrupt core business processes. You should also weigh the complexity, time, and resources needed to remediate each vulnerability. Finally, you should consider the potential impact on your brand and customers if the vulnerability is exploited.
Remediate Vulnerabilities
After identifying vulnerabilities, they must be fixed to protect against cyber attacks. This complex process requires commitment from all stakeholders, including IT teams, business owners, and security leaders. Vulnerability management solutions typically recommend remediation techniques, such as deploying available software patches and reconfiguring hardware appliances. Mitigation options are also available if a patch isn’t possible or appropriate. Documentation should be created for each vulnerability, whether remediated or mitigated, and teams should regularly monitor progress.
Hackers continue inventing new ways to exploit vulnerabilities, so your team must constantly work to prevent them from slipping through the cracks and wreaking havoc on your business. The best way to do this is by following best practices for vulnerability remediation and monitoring.
Monitor Vulnerabilities
The vulnerability management process is an ongoing effort to identify and address vulnerabilities that pose a security risk to your organization. This data- and knowledge-intensive process requires security teams to constantly monitor their environments and assets.
Vulnerability monitoring is the key to catching vulnerabilities early. Detect and respond to software issues, misconfigurations, active ports, and other threats that may lead to a cyberattack or inadvertently disclose sensitive data.
Effective vulnerability management is the foundation of a strong security posture that ensures regulatory compliance, reduces risk to your business operations and customers, and prevents costly data breaches. You need a continuous vulnerability monitoring process that delivers visibility and recognition of on-premise and external web assets. Also, you need a tool to assess vulnerabilities for exploitability and impact based on their workability, CVE impact type, patch availability, and other factors.