The continuous practice of locating and evaluating security gaps in your IT infrastructure is known as vulnerability management. Cybercriminals exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in hardware, software, and operational processes to compromise systems and networks.
Multiple experts say organizations must make someone accountable for it and track critical metrics to implement a successful vulnerability management program. They also must define clear goals and establish workflows.
Asset Discovery
The first step of any vulnerability management program is identifying all hardware and software in your network. This includes internal and external systems connected to your business, from employee-owned devices to third-party software solutions and cloud services.
This discovery process is like a health checkup for your digital assets. It uncovers weak spots that cybercriminals could exploit, like software flaws and misconfigurations.
Once a complete inventory is created, it’s time to assess the risks and prioritize remediation tasks. The goal here is to funnel resources to vulnerabilities that pose the most significant threat, saving time and money while ensuring maximum protection.
Prioritization
Once a vulnerability landscape is mapped, it’s essential to identify the most critical vulnerabilities and assess whether immediate remediation is required. Depending on the asset’s importance to your business and security context, this may include reducing or eliminating exposure or taking other measures.
This step involves prioritizing the discovered vulnerabilities based on their risk level and how they relate to your enterprise assets (servers, applications, or networks). Vulnerability scanning tools typically have thousands of flaws in a single report, making it difficult to decide which to fix immediately.
Scanning
Scanning is identifying and assessing hardware, software, and application vulnerabilities. This is done using a vulnerability scanner designed to move through your digital systems and discover weaknesses attackers can exploit to gain access.
Prioritizing and assessing vulnerabilities is critical to an effective vulnerability management program. It allows you to focus on fixing high-risk threats rather than spending time tackling low-severity issues that don’t pose much of a threat.
As part of this step, it’s essential to understand how your assets interact. For example, you should determine if a critical asset – such as an executive laptop or customer help desk terminal – is vulnerable to a particular attack and evaluate how it could impact other assets.
Assessment
Vulnerability management involves proactively identifying, prioritizing, remediating, and reporting vulnerabilities to reduce cyber risk. Modern security teams are often responsible for over 160,000 systems, including devices, applications, and cloud workloads, making it difficult to get visibility into all their environment’s assets.
The assessment step helps to improve visibility into these environments and determine the methods that will be used to perform vulnerability assessments. This includes risk prioritization, where vulnerabilities are prioritized based on the impact they could have and the likelihood of exploitation, much like a doctor determining which health issues are most critical to address first.
Risk Prioritization
When you have more vulnerabilities than your team can fix, it’s critical to prioritize them based on their severity and likelihood of exploitation. That way, your team can focus on resolving the most dangerous threats first.
One common approach is to prioritize risks based on their estimated remediation cost. This can help teams with limited budgets get the most value from their investment by addressing the riskiest problems first.
You may also choose to organize and rank your risks based on other factors, including their criticality to business operations, exposure to third parties or the public, regulatory compliance, or data sensitivity. This step can be a dynamic process that adapts to changing threats and digital landscapes.
Remediation
Once vulnerabilities have been identified, the next step is to remediate them. This is a critical part of vulnerability management to prevent attackers from exploiting weaknesses in your network.
Typically, this involves patching the vulnerabilities to reduce the risk of attack. However, not all vulnerabilities can be fixed immediately. As such, it’s important to prioritize based on severity and impact.
Concentrating on the most severe vulnerabilities first helps guarantee that resources are used appropriately. It also provides transparency to business operations to demonstrate progress in reducing vulnerability exposure.
Reporting
As part of this process, you’ll want to create a transparent reporting system that allows your teams to track progress, especially when reporting to Executives. This will help show your program’s value and is a great way to justify staffing and tool investments.
Vulnerabilities in hardware and software that allow hackers to access systems and sensitive data are known as security vulnerabilities. Often, this involves patching software or changing configurations to fix these flaws before they’re exploited.
Vulnerability management continuously identifies, assesses, and remediates vulnerabilities to reduce cyber risk. A structured approach ensures a robust defense in an ever-evolving threat landscape.
