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Enterprise Security Magazine | Wednesday, November 15, 2023
A more granular risk management approach requires the consideration of interconnected systems and components.
FREMONT, CA: It is cyclical to manage vulnerabilities in today's threat landscape. In the complex interplay between people and technology, new vulnerabilities are constantly emerging due to a dynamic and expanding attack surface. Vulnerability management is more than finding vulnerabilities, fixing them, and calling them good.
Vulnerabilities are flaws in computer systems that malicious actors can exploit to infect the system. It is crucial to emphasize that vulnerabilities aren't just caused by weak software or hardware design or implementation; they can also arise from how a system is operated or managed.
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Six steps in the vulnerability management cycle
Discover: Vulnerabilities must be discovered and inventoried to conduct vulnerability scanning. It is essential to conduct comprehensive discovery to avoid situations in which there are vulnerabilities in your systems or apps that aren't being tracked correctly.
A network scanner, a cloud management console, and a dedicated asset discovery platform are valuable tools for tracking all IT assets. An inventory can be refined or updated once established due to the iterative nature of the vulnerability lifecycle.
Prioritize Assets: The importance of every asset varies for businesses, so systems should be grouped according to their priority. A high-priority asset is vital to the company's operation, which cannot tolerate faults or store sensitive information.
Because a lack of resources often constrains vulnerability management programs, it's prudent to concentrate on hunting down vulnerabilities in high-priority assets. Organizations face a significantly higher risk of compromise when high-impact systems are neglected and left vulnerable. Despite taking a back seat in vulnerability assessments, lower-priority assets are addressed.
Assess: Traditional vulnerability scans are performed during the assessment stage, ideally with a high level of automation. The goal should be both breadth and depth. The range of your security comes from deploying dedicated tools that scan web applications, cloud infrastructure, and all other assets in your inventory for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, etc. Penetration testing can add depth to your security program, as expert security testers probe for vulnerabilities not easily detected by scans.
Combining your prioritized assets with your vulnerabilities list is essential after enumerating vulnerabilities. An assessment of the vulnerability's risk level and the asset's exposure level is included in this contextual information. These details lay the foundation for accurate and meaningful reporting on vulnerabilities and their remediation priorities.
Report: Documented findings should be presented to stakeholders through compiled data collected during previous steps. It is essential to tailor reports to different audiences based on their technical needs. Communication of high-level trends at the executive level and to other technology decision-makers must be concise. Security teams need clear and detailed reports to facilitate smooth remediation efforts, ideally with suggested fixes included.
Remediate: In the remediation phase, all actions to fix vulnerabilities are included, such as applying security patches, upgrading hardware, and changing configurations. There are times when direct remediation is not possible, so the best course of action will be to mitigate the risk of exploitation until a fix becomes practical, for example, isolating a vulnerable system from the rest of the network. Prioritizing remediation will depend on the severity of a vulnerability and the criticality of the underlying system.
Verify: Check whether any mitigation or removal attempts have been successful, and the verification phase completes the vulnerability management lifecycle. Because organizations need to scan and assess their IT environments for vulnerabilities regularly, the verification phase can overlap with the discovering and evaluating stages of the next cycle. To verify the success of remediation actions, follow-up audits involving separate re-scans or penetration tests can be conducted.
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