Surviving the Weekly CVE Review Gauntlet

Every week, IT and security teams gather – be it in a virtual conference room or a cramped huddle space – prepared to spend an hour or two wincing at massive lists of “Critical” and “High” severity vulnerabilities. The vulnerability management tools have done their job, dutifully regurgitating every fresh CVE from public feeds. On paper, this seems logical: consolidate vulnerabilities, prioritize patches, and improve the organization’s security posture. Yet in practice, these review sessions can feel like a grueling ritual that leaves everyone frustrated and no closer to a true understanding of the organization’s genuine risk landscape.

Tools like Kenna and Tenable pride themselves on their Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) capabilities. They incorporate threat intelligence – tapping into information on exploits “in the wild” – and then rank vulnerabilities based on their popularity among attackers. At first glance, this sounds great – why not focus on what the bad guys are doing out there? But this threat-centric approach often fails to consider your internal environment. Robust controls like EDR solutions, well-tuned firewalls, advanced segmentation, and strict MFA policies might drastically reduce the effective exposure of a given CVE. Yet the tool’s scoring rarely accounts for these local defenses. A vulnerability that’s menacing in a poorly secured environment may pose negligible risk in your hardened network.

Worse still, traditional CVE-centric discussions ignore an entire universe of other high-risk exposures. There are misconfigurations in cloud services, missing controls around critical assets, unaddressed application security flaws, risky user behaviors, and resiliency issues that never surface in these CVE reviews. While everyone is focused on the latest external CVEs, critical internal gaps – like a single misconfigured account that grants attackers free rein – remain dangerously overlooked.

The inefficiencies aren’t just hypothetical; they have real costs. Imagine a daily vulnerability review meeting with 15 people for two hours: that’s 30 person-hours per day. Over a year (roughly 260 workdays), that translates into about 7,800 person-hours. At $140/hour, that’s a staggering $1.09M in lost productivity annually. Even a smaller scenario – 3 people for one hour daily – hits 780 person-hours, or $109,000 per year. From an individual’s perspective, that’s 26% of one person’s productivity spent on repetitive CVE sessions. And despite all this time, effort, and expense, many vulnerabilities remain marked as critical, burdening IT teams and application owners with non useful work.

To break free from these tedious cycles, you need a comprehensive, context-rich approach. Balbix offers an AI-powered approach to Exposure Management. The Balbix “brain” continuously ingests and correlates data from across your entire IT and security ecosystem – vulnerability scanners, threat intelligence feeds, CMDB asset and business context, configuration management databases, security controls (EDR, EPP, firewalls), application security (AppSec) tools, user risk analytics, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) platforms, pen test results, and more. It goes beyond CVEs, incorporating misconfigurations, control gaps, user risk findings, and resilience considerations into a single, holistic risk view.

Let’s take an example. Consider CVE-2021-44228, the infamous vulnerability in Log4j, the Java-based logging framework used by many applications and services. It has the highest possible CVSS of 10.0, it’s ubiquitous across the entire software ecosystem and, although it was a top focus for all security teams for the past several years, it’s still present in many environments, due to its wide spread and deep dependencies. It’s important to note that CVE-2021-44228 can be mitigated through a configuration change by setting log4j2.formatMsgNoLookups to True, preventing malicious JNDI lookups with RCEs and providing a risk-reduction alternative when upgrading to a newer Java is not an option. Other security controls can also be employed, such as a regular Firewall, a Web App Firewall, or an EDR.

With Balbix, things are different: the Balbix AI Brain continuously unifies vulnerability, compliance, threat intelligence, and compensating controls to calculate context-aware risk, factoring in asset criticality, business impact, and existing mitigations. In addition, by mapping these insights to MITRE ATT&CK TTPs and enumerating potential attack paths, Balbix calculates your actual exposure, highlighting which weaknesses matter most in your unique environment. Low risk vulnerability instances are automatically triaged away without human intervention, based on how much risk your organization is willing to accept. More details about Balbix’s 4th generation vulnerability prioritization are here.

Stakeholders can also leverage BIX, Balbix’s natural language interface, to instantly query their risk posture: “What’s our exposure to this TTP?” or “Which issues threaten our critical assets right now?” Instead of waiting for a frustrating weekly meeting to parse through outdated severity scores, anyone – from CISOs to frontline IT staff – can access actionable intelligence on-demand.

With Balbix’s comprehensive, context-aware platform, you can finally align your remediation efforts with exposures that genuinely threaten your organization. Instead of enduring another year of wasted time and money on hollow CVE reviews, you can reclaim your productivity, reallocate your resources, and restore a sense of purpose to your security operations. The weekly CVE review gauntlet may have once felt inevitable, but it no longer has to define how you manage risk.

To learn more, please schedule a demo of Balbix.