In a recent report, over a third of executives said their main challenge within cybersecurity was inaccurate risk identification, highlighting the importance of an effective and accurate vulnerability management (VM) program.
This article delves into vulnerability management’s importance, outlines its four-stage process and discusses the best practices for managing vulnerabilities effectively including selecting a VM tool.
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management (VM) is an ongoing process that involves continually identifying, prioritizing and remediating security weaknesses within an organization’s assets and softwares to lower the cyber risk and protect organizations from potential cyber attacks.
Think of it as a health check for your network and assets. As cyber threats continually occur and develop over time, keeping up with vulnerability management is becoming increasingly challenging. So, staying proactive in maintaining a secure environment for your organization is important.
A typical cybersecurity vulnerability management process has four stages: discovery, prioritization, response, reporting and monitoring. We’ll discuss each one and how each stage works below.
The Four-Stage Vulnerability Management Process
Discovery
The first step towards effective vulnerability management is to know “what” to scan, which begins by gaining a comprehensive view of all the assets in your organization. A thorough and accurate asset inventory is crucial for identifying all potential vulnerabilities. Your system’s coverage is only adequate if it detects a few types of assets. Consider using an automated asset discovery and inventory solution to identify and inventory all kinds of assets, allowing you to manage risk across your entire attack surface.
An automated system powered by specialized AI/ML can address the challenge of consolidating asset and vulnerability information across your entire enterprise, regardless of the number of tools or repositories you may have. Automation enables your team to collect, de-duplicate, correlate, and analyze asset data from multiple repositories in real-time, providing a more accurate, real-time view of your assets and vulnerabilities.
Prioritization
Prioritizing vulnerability remediation effectively ensures your security team isn’t wasting time addressing low-risk issues. Not all vulnerabilities pose the same risk to your systems, so it’s crucial to gain context around each vulnerability and the assets it affects.
To prioritize vulnerability remediations, organizations should implement a risk-based approach, utilizing a vulnerability management platform that understands the business context, considers the value of each asset, and considers vulnerabilities, active threats, exposure due to software usage, and any existing mitigating controls.
Response
After identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities in your systems, evaluating their risks and determining effective management strategies is crucial. You can treat vulnerabilities in several ways, including fully fixing or patching them (remediation), lessening the likelihood of exploitation (mitigation), or accepting the risk posed by the vulnerability and taking no action.
Using a risk-based vulnerability management tool, you can analyze different remediation scenarios and their related risk reduction results to determine the best remediation option for your security team, such as highly tuned patch instructions. This tool can also help align remediation efforts with business priorities by identifying the owners of risk issues and assigning them remediation tasks.
Reporting and Monitoring
Reporting and monitoring the progress of a vulnerability management (VM) program is crucial to ensure its success. Regular supervision helps in identifying areas that need adjustments or enhancements, guaranteeing the program stays effective and up-to-date any new risks or vulnerabilities.
Additionally, monitoring key vulnerability metrics not only demonstrates the improvement of the program over time in financial terms, which is easily understood by boards and non-technical executive staff but also showcases significant milestones and achievements within the program. We’ve created a guide of 11 VM metrics to help you decide what and why to measure them. This practice supports informed decision-making and promotes a proactive security posture.
Benefits of Vulnerability Management
VM is becoming increasingly important to companies due to the rising threat of cyber security attacks. It is the cornerstone of your cybersecurity initiative because any vulnerabilities left unidentified and unaddressed can bring your business down.
- Reduced Risk of Cyber Attacks: By identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in their systems, organizations can significantly lower the likelihood of successful cyber attacks, protecting critical data and infrastructure.
- Regulatory Compliance: Vulnerability management ensures that organizations meet regulatory requirements related to cybersecurity, avoiding potential fines and legal issues.
- Operational Resilience: Timely identification and mitigation of vulnerabilities contribute to the stability and resilience of IT systems, ensuring that security incidents do not disrupt business operations.
- Cost Savings: While investing in vulnerability management requires upfront costs, it is far less expensive than the potential costs associated with data breaches, including remediation, legal fees, and lost business.
- Improved Incident Response: Vulnerability management processes improve the efficiency of incident response by providing clear insights into system weaknesses that need to be addressed quickly in the event of an attack.
- Strategic Risk Management: By systematically identifying, classifying, prioritizing, and addressing vulnerabilities, organizations can better inform their overall risk management strategies and make more informed decisions about where to allocate resources.
Selecting a Vulnerability Management Tool
In terms of vulnerability management, we often see the application of individual vulnerability scanners and projects in various parts of an organization. However, a truly effective vulnerability management program operates at a higher level. From assessing vulnerabilities initially to onboarding a fully-fledged vulnerability management tool, we’ll explain how to select a tool below.
Conduct a vulnerability assessment
Effective vulnerability management starts with your ability to assess vulnerabilities. An effective vulnerability assessment program gives your organization the tools to understand its security weaknesses, consider the associated risks, and put protections in place that reduce the likelihood of a breach. These vulnerability assessments are conducted regularly to identify hazards, assess the likelihood of a security failure, and help you focus scarce resources on the things that matter most.
Challenges of finding the right vulnerability management tool
Regular scanning for vulnerabilities is a good start but needs to be improved due to the dynamic nature of IT environments. There are limitations of some vulnerability management solutions you should be aware of and make sure they’re not a limiting factor in the software you’re considering. A few examples of these limitations include:
- Relying on a rules-based approach, limiting scans to known vulnerabilities.
- Needing an up-to-date IT asset inventory makes it hard to track all devices and determine their importance to the business.
- Focusing on scanning only enterprise-owned, managed IT assets and neglecting unmanaged, cloud-based, and IoT devices.
- Performing scans episodically rather than continuously, requiring manual restarts for each new scan.
- Earmarking a large volume of vulnerabilities, overwhelms teams, especially when they struggle to keep up with patching.
What to look for in a vulnerability management tool
However, even with the above limitations, there are platforms that can surmount these challenges and provide organizations with a comprehensive overview of their risk landscape and prioritize risks effectively.
CSO Online gave a quick but detailed list of what a successful vulnerability management solution should include: “A full-featured vulnerability management product or suite of products must be able to support, at minimum, a repeatable lifecycle of asset discovery and enumeration, vulnerability detection, risk assessment, configuration compliance assessment, change management and remediation, verification, and auditing and reporting.”
You should also consider the following features when selecting a vulnerability management tool:
- Vulnerability scanning tools are crucial for vulnerability management, aiding detection and risk assessment.
- Post-remediation re-scans determine the success of corrective actions, like patch applications or configuration error corrections.
- Machine learning and AI impact many sectors, including cybersecurity, by automating threat detection and response more efficiently than traditional methods.
Best Practices for Effective Vulnerability Management
Every new vulnerability introduces a new security risk to an organization. To mitigate these risks and improve your security posture, your security team must implement an effective vulnerability management program to help stop and prevent attacks.
To do so, you’ll want to keep in mind the following vulnerability management best practices:
- Recognize what you are trying to protect by discovering and inventorying all IT assets, including systems, applications, devices, data, business processes, and users, through regular scans and vulnerability assessments.
- Employ an AI-powered cyber risk management platform that continuously monitors all assets and proactively predicts what vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited.
- Risk prioritization and mitigation: Adopt a risk-based vulnerability management approach to your security measures to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their threat to your organization.
- Develop a patch management strategy so your security team can effectively determine how to manage vulnerabilities using the best remediation approach.
Conclusion
Vulnerability management is vital for reducing cyberattack risks by identifying and remedying security weaknesses. Its four-stage process—discovery, prioritization, response, and monitoring—ensures operational resilience and regulatory compliance. Learn more about how Balbix can help VM teams here.
