The more complex your IT system, the more attack surfaces a bad actor can exploit. Your system’s vulnerabilities can include anything from endpoints and databases to routers and wireless devices. A robust vulnerability management program takes a proactive approach to identifying threats and preventing problems before they cripple your systems. Every vulnerability in your system represents a risk.
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is one part of an organization's cybersecurity practice. It’s the ongoing process of finding and addressing vulnerabilities in the company’s IT infrastructure, including all of the equipment, third-party software, and any proprietary software programs the company uses.
Many companies use a vulnerability management lifecycle as part of their vulnerability management program. The vulnerability management lifecycle is a structured approach to address vulnerabilities before they’re exploited. Part of the lifecycle also includes determining the company’s appetite for risk and identifying how to best allocate budget and resources to manage that risk.
Benefits of a Vulnerability Management Program
A comprehensive vulnerability management program helps you identify and prioritize your critical vulnerabilities and gives you the data-driven insights you need to more efficiently allocate your resources. This continuous cycle of improvement also ensures your system complies with industry regulations and standards, setting you apart from the competition.
The vulnerability management lifecycle also helps validate the effectiveness and impact of your threat assessments and solutions. It also raises the critical importance of cyber security and security awareness throughout the organization. Continuous vulnerability assessment and mitigation can also help you create a better incident response program so that if something does go wrong, you can address it quickly and efficiently.
Stages of the Vulnerability Management Lifecycle
Most vulnerability management lifecycle consists of five stages:
- Asset inventory
- Vulnerability identification and assessment
- Prioritization
- Remediation
- Verification and monitoring
Not every organization uses all of these steps in its vulnerability management cycle. Some companies include prioritization as part of the vulnerability identification and assessment process or combine prioritization and remediation into one step. And some organizations include a pre-planning step to identify key stakeholders to include or define success metrics.
Because an attack surface can be quite large, it may be impossible to address all the identified vulnerabilities during one lifecycle. Many companies address the identified vulnerabilities in batches, focusing on physical risks (like routers or credit card machines) in one cycle, while another cycle may focus on endpoint security.
1. Asset Inventory
The first step of the vulnerability management lifecycle process is usually an inventory to identify all of your company’s assets. It should include all hardware and software, such as:
- Applications
- Operating systems
- Servers
- Databases
- Endpoints
- Physical devices
- Third-party tools
This inventory allows you to identify critical assets and prioritize them during the cycle. It’s also a useful way to update and maintain your general IT asset inventory.
Many companies also use this step to assign owners to the most critical assets. This helps the team keep track of who is responsible for what throughout the vulnerability management process and beyond.
The inventory should also include any official assets that could pose security risks to your systems. For example, when employees use their phones to access critical systems or use their personal email accounts from a company computer, the risk exposure could compromise your systems.
2. Vulnerability Identification and Assessment
Once your team has a complete asset inventory, you can begin searching for and assessing vulnerabilities throughout the system.
Most organizations use a combination of automated and manual scanning in conjunction with intelligence reports to identify vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management tools can help speed and automate the process.
3. Prioritization
At the end of the assessment, your team has likely identified multiple vulnerabilities that need to be addressed, but it’s unlikely you have the budget, tools, or time to patch all of them. To determine the most effective and efficient way to allocate resources, security teams prioritize critical vulnerabilities to determine which ones to address first.
While some answers are easy, not all are. Part of prioritizing vulnerabilities and assessing the risk includes how many resources the company can devote to fixing the problem and whether or not a vulnerability is worth fixing when it’s a minor problem.
Some organizations use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to rank and evaluate vulnerabilities. However, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommends using the Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC) to prioritize vulnerabilities, often using information like CVSS scores.
No matter how your team ranks, evaluates, and prioritizes vulnerabilities, most methods rely on the team manually assessing and ranking threat levels, which is time-consuming.
Using CVSS, the team ranks each vulnerability across common risks, like attack vectors or user interaction. Using a series of questions and answers, the team assigns a value of zero (no threat) to 10 (critical threat) to score the risk of the patch.
SSVC uses a decision tree process to help the team prioritize which vulnerabilities to address first, based on risk, threat severity, and other factors.
While the models use different criteria to assess threat levels, they can be equally challenging to use. Someone has to run each identified vulnerability through the model to evaluate and prioritize it, which can lead to delays in remediating severe threats and open the ranking process to human error.
Integrating an automated approach to prioritizing and patching vulnerabilities can reduce the time it takes to remediate threats and the possibility of human error.
4. Remediation
After the vulnerabilities are ranked and prioritized, your team can start fixing them.
A critical vulnerability often requires an immediate patch to reduce the attack surface and the possibility that threat actors exploit an unpatched vulnerability. However, critical patches are not always applied promptly because the security team doesn’t want to take devices offline during business hours or risk sending out a bad update.
Automated patch management tools can reduce the time between identifying and patching a vulnerability to secure your network quickly. Smart systems allow IT teams to schedule critical patch updates during non-peak business hours or to work in the background when necessary.
The remediation step of a vulnerability lifecycle is also a good time to update your current incident response plans and create new incident response plans for identified and emerging threats.
5. Verification and Monitoring
After deploying the updates, you need to verify that the remediation was successful. Once the fix is verified, your team will continue monitoring the fix and the specific threat to defend against any new vulnerabilities that appear.
The final step includes reporting to key stakeholders about the vulnerabilities and solutions your team implemented, and how they protect the business and its customers.
Implementing a Vulnerability Management Program
An effective and robust vulnerability management program is one that’s actively used, maintained, and updated. In addition to continuous monitoring and scanning for new threats, effective vulnerability management programs follows these best practices:
- Identify and assign asset owners to increase accountability
- Provide consistent and up-to-date training on secure coding and security practices
- Stay aware of unofficial assets and have a policy to govern their use
Addressing Challenges in the Vulnerability Management Lifecycle
Manual vulnerability assessment and management can be a resource-intensive and time-consuming process that can overwhelm your staff. The lack of integration between vulnerability management and patching leads to a disconnect between security teams and IT operations, while manual data handling and inconsistent endpoint visibility increase the risk an unpatched vulnerability is exploited.
Remediating and patching vulnerabilities reduces your threat surface, helping your endpoints and network stay protected, improving your security posture, and ensuring your business isn’t interrupted. Integrating vulnerability management with automated patch management solutions bridges the gap between IT and security, ensuring security vulnerabilities don’t leave your network exposed.
Automated patching transforms your vulnerability management from reactive to proactive, protecting your endpoints in an evolving threat landscape. Download our free ebook and learn how autonomous patching protects your network.
