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Addressing Threats With Modern Vulnerability Management
A solid cyber security defense is a corporate necessity. With a proactive approach, you'll avoid both disruptive attacks, strained IT resources, a tarnished brand image, or even legal consequences. Creating a robust cyber security defense requires you to take active initiatives. Your scope should include detecting various vulnerabilities and potential risks in systems, web applications, and employees.
Proactive Security Measures
Vulnerability management is a proactive security measure, the act of searching for security gaps that exist before they are exploited. However, vulnerability management is more than patching and reconfiguring security settings; it necessitates a continuous approach to IT across the organization.
Greater Control Over Your IT Environment
The discovery phase is about understanding which assets are present in the IT environment. Including physical and virtual networks, on-premises, cloud networks, or any other potential attack surface that an attacker might use.
Asset discovery is the process of mapping assets and creating a database to scan for vulnerabilities. So, once you know what vulnerabilities or types of vulnerabilities you are looking for, you can begin identifying which are present. This stage uses threat intelligence information, vulnerability data, and scanners to create an inventory for patch management.
Endpoint Agents
You can use an endpoint agent instead of a vulnerability scanner to scan critical infrastructure or remote workers
Complete Attack Surface
Create a complete map of your attack surface, including all the critical assets that store data – from hardware to software vulnerabilities
Gather Data
Keep your data up to date to avoid getting caught off guard by any potential intrusions or data leaks.
Understand Your Business Risks
After every asset has been identified, you should decide where to put security efforts and reduce potential risks. The vulnerabilities will be ranked from highest to lowest risk in this step, depending on multiple factors. A vulnerability management platform helps to prioritize vulnerabilities based on the MITRE CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure) score and threat intelligence.
Asset Classification
It's impossible to identify and patch every single vulnerability. Instead, you must identify all priority assets that would cause severe damage to the business if they were compromised. You need to understand the cyber exposure of all assets, including vulnerabilities, misconfiguration, and other indicators.
Baseline Risk Profile
Create a detailed picture of the organizational structure, current software, and programs used. Understanding the configuration and technology present in your organization will make identifying weak spots and prioritizing patching easier
Actionable Steps to Patch All Security Issues
Your team should focus on vulnerabilities that expose your organization to the most significant risk. This would include remediating critical vulnerabilities and eliminating false positives.
Remediating Vulnerabilities
You can remediate a vulnerability by updating the system, platform, or service configurations and waiting for patch deployment.
Patch Management
Patch deployment is challenging, with tests and patches taking up both valuable time and resources. The deployment process might impact business-critical operating systems and infrastructure or the application itself.
Streamlined Communication Ensuring Business Continuity
The last step in the vulnerability management process is internal communication, specifically reporting. Information about vulnerabilities should be easy enough to be interpreted by all affected levels of the organization.
Track Trends
Reporting includes analyzing vulnerability data, tracking patterns and trends, and identifying issues that warrant further investigation.
Improve Security Posture
Reports help improve business and security posture management, current development over time, and other corporate risk management processes.
The Objective Way of Assessing Security
Vulnerability assessment systematically looks for unlocked doors, bad code, open ports, or other security weaknesses in an information system. Vulnerability assessment provides you with an objective overview of how susceptible your systems are to any known vulnerabilities, by assigning severity levels to the vulnerabilities, and recommending remediation or mitigation steps if needed.
Web Application Scanners
Crawl through the pages of web applications to detect security vulnerabilities, malware, and logical flaws.
Protocol Scanners
Search for vulnerable protocols, ports, and network services
Network Scanners
Detect known vulnerabilities of computing systems available on a network. Identify weak spots in application software or the operating system.
What is Security Posture?
The overall cyber security defense of an organization is known as security posture. This includes how well an organization can predict, prevent, and respond to cyber threats. It also covers visibility into the company’s attack surface and the ability to react and recover from security breaches.
Assess
Evaluate vulnerabilities risk-based across a broad range of attack vectors like unpatched software, phishing, misconfigurations, password issues, etc.
Identify Gaps
Know which steps are needed to improve the cyber security posture going forward. Continuously review gaps in your security controls and make appropriate changes.
Take Action
Take action to eliminate known gaps. An effective cyber security posture is developed through the right combination of tools, techniques, and approaches.
What to Look For in a Vulnerability Management Solution
Choosing between vulnerability management solutions can be quite a complex process. You should always start by identifying your organization's needs and ensuring the solutions you're evaluating meet those needs.
Here are some key questions to keep in mind when assessing a vulnerability management solution:
- How much time is required to get the system up and running?
- Does the tool run non-intrusively?
- Does the vulnerability scoring incorporate real-time threat intelligence about current exploits — or does it only look at historical data?
- Does the vendor provide agents that work with cloud-based and purely on-premises deployments?
- Does the tool easily integrate with other security systems, such as SIEM (security information and event management) and IDS (intrusion detection systems)?
- Can I easily customize reporting for my specific needs?
