Managing vulnerabilities is a significant part of IT’s job. They track existing and emerging threats, decide which threats are patched first, and explain their reasoning to the company. While traditional vulnerability management programs assess the risk of every known vulnerability, they don’t do a good job of prioritizing vulnerabilities. Not every company needs to patch every known threat right away.
Risk-based vulnerability management is a newer approach to application security and management that contextualizes risk. Understanding which vulnerabilities are an immediate threat makes it easier for IT to prioritize their efforts more effectively and secure systems.
What Is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is the proactive and ongoing identification, classification, prioritization, remediation, and mitigation of software vulnerabilities. Fixing these security gaps decreases the odds of your system being hacked and helps ensure your business runs smoothly.
A vulnerability management program is your company’s approach to risk and remediation. It’s the processes and procedures you use to identify, prioritize, and repair known vulnerabilities.
Legacy Vulnerability Management Programs
Traditional vulnerability management programs were created when there were far fewer threats and vulnerabilities in the wild, as well as fewer software systems and endpoints for your company to manage.
In a legacy vulnerability management program, the security team identifies every known vulnerability across your systems. Then, they remediate them, starting with the most critical or severe vulnerabilities. While some high-risk vulnerabilities are more critical than others, each risk is treated equally, meaning the security team is expected to fix all of them no matter how much of a risk each vulnerability poses to the organization.
But when numerous vulnerabilities need remediation, the team can be overwhelmed trying to tackle this list and get everything patched. As a result, they may not have time to attend to other tasks, reducing the team’s overall efficiency and productivity.
Decreased productivity and efficiency aren’t the only drawbacks to legacy vulnerability management tools and programs. Many companies rely on cloud-based software and solutions, increasing the number of potential vulnerabilities that can be exploited in real time. Fast-paced development lifecycles and upgrades can make it difficult to keep up with and remediate emerging threats.
Legacy vulnerability management solutions also place more weight on external threats, often over internal vulnerabilities. For example, successful phishing attempts may be a more significant threat to network security than an unpatched vulnerability on a single endpoint.
However, the largest inefficiency of traditional vulnerability management programs is that they lack context. While traditional programs help companies identify every security risk and rank how critical or severe each risk is, they don’t address the risk each vulnerability poses to the business.
A critical vulnerability may be just that, but leaving it unpatched may only pose a minor or no threat to some businesses. However, legacy vulnerability management doesn't always take this into account. Instead, they list threats in order of severity without analyzing how risky each threat is to the organization or that the company may be willing to live with the potential threat the unpatched vulnerability poses. As a result, security teams may waste time and resources patching and remediating vulnerabilities they may not need to.
What Is Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?
Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) is a more modern and business-centric approach to assessing and prioritizing vulnerabilities. A risk-based approach allows the security team to be more strategic and optimize how, when, and where they use their resources.
Instead of treating all vulnerabilities the same, risk-based vulnerability management contextualizes each threat as it relates to the business. Not every business views known vulnerabilities through the same lens, so what may be considered severe vulnerabilities to one company may be minor to another, allowing security teams to prioritize what they patch first based on the potential risk to your business. They’ll move efficiently and quickly, prioritizing the most critical vulnerabilities to improve the company’s security posture.
Use Data to Drive Decisions
Traditional vulnerability management tools and programs generate a list of potential threats without any context or data to explain why one threat is more critical than another or why it should be patched. Risk-based vulnerability management programs help security teams more accurately and effectively prioritize vulnerabilities and understand the potential threat to the entire organization by incorporating data to demonstrate why a particular threat is severe and needs immediate attention.
Identified vulnerabilities are assessed against the potential threat to the business. A scoring system helps the team rate how big of a threat the vulnerability is, how likely it is to be exploited, and the problems it might cause the business if the exploit is used.
This objective assessment of threats and risks helps the security team target their activities, reducing the time the team spends patching less critical vulnerabilities and ensuring they aren’t overwhelmed with an endless list of tasks.
Explains Why and How
Most organizations accept that some risk is a part of doing business, but some businesses have a higher tolerance for risk than others. Risk-based vulnerability management allows security teams to more quickly identify and address the vulnerabilities that exceed the company’s risk threshold and provide context to identified vulnerabilities like:
- Threat intelligence. Analyzing the potential threat a vulnerability poses allows the security team to anticipate, prevent, and respond to possible attacks.
- Asset criticality. Measures how important a particular asset (where data is stored, for example) is to the company and its operation.
- Exploitability. Predicts how likely this particular vulnerability will be exploited now or in the future.
Using these and other data points allows the team to explain what makes a patch critical, why it should be prioritized, and why the team isn’t “patching it all right now.”
Improves Efficiency
Switching to a risk-based vulnerability management program also helps your security team respond to threats more quickly and efficiently. They’ll have more visibility into the current and future threat landscape, allowing them to allocate resources more efficiently. Since they won’t be patching every vulnerability right away, they’re better able to respond to threats before they happen.
How to Implement a Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Program
Implementing a risk-based vulnerability management program for your company requires insight into what you have, what you need, and how much risk you’re willing to take.
Identify Essential Assets and Their Business Role
The first step is to identify your key assets. What systems or information are mission-critical and would bring your business to a halt if it were compromised? The more crucial the asset, the higher the risk. Essential or critical assets could include:
- Customer data
- Vendor relationship information
- Proprietary data or research
- Intellectual property
In addition to these assets, inventory your IT environment. What endpoints do users have, and are personal devices allowed to access the network? What cloud-based solutions are you using to manage information? The more systems you use or endpoints that access your network, the larger the attack surface.
Assess and Score Potential Risks
Once you’ve identified and inventoried your assets, the security team can begin assessing the risk to each. The score reflects the impact on business operations if the vulnerability is exploited. Generally speaking, the higher the score, the more critical the vulnerability.
What to Look for in a Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Tool
Once the team has inventoried assets and started assessing risks, you can look for a risk-based management tool to improve how your employees respond to emerging and real-time threats. Here are some key things to look for.
Threat Intelligence
A risk-based vulnerability management tool with a threat intelligence feature is a must, as it helps the team prioritize present and future risks more accurately. A tool that aggregates data from a variety of sources is more likely to give you up-to-date and actionable threat intelligence that’s relevant to your organization.
Configurable
The ability to customize the tool with your security policies and internal threat assessment ensures remediation and patching align with your company’s risk tolerance and prioritizes the updates that your company has determined are most critical.
Automatic
Automating the deployment of patches and updates decreases the likelihood of introducing human error and frees the team to focus on other critical tasks.
Take a Risk-Based Approach to Vulnerability Management
It’s almost impossible to keep up with and remediate every vulnerability out there. A risk-based approach to vulnerability management allows your security team to prioritize which threats are patched first based on which ones pose the most significant risk to your organization so they can optimize their time and focus resources on the things that matter most.
Adaptiva’s OneSite Patch uses a risk-based approach to vulnerability remediation. You can configure the system to align with your needs and automate the entire process, freeing your IT team to work effectively and efficiently. Schedule a demo today.
