What is Vulnerability Management?

What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management is an ongoing process of identifying and assessing cyber vulnerabilities in your organization. It involves reporting and remediating these vulnerabilities as well. Your vulnerability management tool will scan endpoints, workloads, and systems. Threat and vulnerability management uses different detection techniques to patch and remediate them. Good vulnerability management programs make use of threat intelligence and address risks rapidly.

Vulnerability scanning is a standard component of vulnerability management. Risk-based vulnerability management addresses specific risks that vulnerabilities pose to organizations. It adds additional context, assesses the criticality of assets, exploitability, and also extracts insights from real-world threat intelligence. Vulnerability management protects critical data, weeds out false positives, and highlights genuine risks in your infrastructure. It helps you stay ahead of changing or emerging security threats by constantly adapting your security posture to deal with them.

A vulnerability management policy is an important part of a vulnerability management program. It’s a document that highlights the policies and controls to be implemented within the business for sound vulnerability management. Vulnerability management started somewhere around the early 1980s. The history of vulnerability management is deep and traces back to basic IT security.

Importance of Vulnerability Management

Implementing a solid vulnerability management program helps you identify and remove security risks before cyber criminals exploit them. This way, it helps prevent cyber threats, such as DDoS attacks, zero-day attacks, unauthorized access, phishing, and more.

Here are some of the reasons why vulnerability management is important to your business:

• Prevents cyber risks: Attackers enter your systems through unpatched vulnerabilities. But vulnerability management identifies and addresses these weak points before attacks can find or exploit them. This prevents data breaches and attacks from harming your organization.

• Optimize IT resources: Security teams face difficulties in managing resources while addressing security flaws. Vulnerability management allows security professionals to prioritize risks and understand which security risks are more important. This way, they can allocate resources to security issues based on their criticality.

• Improves customer trust: Customers and partners share their personal data with organizations and expect you will keep up their trust. Data breaches can break that trust and make you pay huge fines. Vulnerability management ensures your organization complies with industry standards and safeguards your data. This helps in improving long-term business relationships and trust.

• Reduces service downtimes: Cyber attacks can disrupt your operations by hijacking your systems, gaining unauthorized access, and manipulating data. An effective vulnerability management program addresses security incidents faster from systems to reduce the risk of attacks and costly downtimes.
• Better incident response: Vulnerability management proactively identifies and mitigates risks. This means businesses can respond to security incidents effectively and strengthen their security posture.

How does Vulnerability Management work?

Here is how vulnerability management works:

The Vulnerability Management Lifecycle

The vulnerability management lifecycle is a systematic way of finding, analyzing, prioritizing, and mitigating vulnerabilities inside an organization’s software solutions and systems. It patches and protects apps and services against various cybersecurity threats.

A vulnerability management process can help organizations understand their security posture much better. It helps them scope out the threat landscape and manage vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis. This builds a proactive security stance, ensures the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive information, and does so much more. You can learn the difference between patch vs vulnerability management here.

Also check out: Exposure Management vs Vulnerability Management

Components of Vulnerability Management

Here are the key components of enterprise vulnerability management:

• Vulnerability scanning – You use software or security scanning tools to check for vulnerabilities in systems, hardware, and other software components, and vulnerability scanning detects insecure configurations, and missing patches..
• Vulnerability assessments – This vulnerability management process is more about how to identify and evaluate vulnerabilities in systems, which means you rank vulnerabilities based on their potential impact, risks, and need a deep understanding of components, operations, and vulnerabilities as a whole in the process.
• Patch management – Vulnerability patch management monitors systems for new patches, it keeps them up-to-date and ensures that patches are tested, controlled, and deployed in a timely manner.
• Vulnerability remediation – The goal of vulnerability remediation is to reduce the likelihood of your systems being exploited, plus it helps find blind spots, security gaps assists with updating firmware.

Vulnerability Management Frameworks and Compliance

Here is what you need to know about vulnerability management frameworks and compliance:

• A vulnerability management framework lays down a set of guidelines and best practices which organizations should follow to patch risks and fix existing vulnerabilities. It’s a supporting structure or blueprint for the organization, basically. You will learn learn about key vulnerability management metrics from it.
• The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is a US government repository that contains info about more than 195,000 common vulnerabilities. Companies around the world use its vulnerability data to spot common threats and locate new CVEs, whenever they come out or published. It’s a reference for global organizations.
• The NIST cybersecurity framework is another example that goes into what kind of safeguards to implement, how to detect and respond to cybersecurity incidents, and establishes recommended recovery processes.

Common Vulnerability Management Challenges

Here are six of the most common vulnerability management challenges that you should be aware of:

• Using traditional scanning tools – Traditional vulnerability scanners are outdated and no good. They leave organizations open to new exploits and can’t detect dynamic threats.
• One-time vulnerability management – Many organizations treat vulnerability management as a one-time process. That’s a big mistake as cyber threats are always ongoing, evolving, and adapt to anything.
• Not prioritizing risks – Some organizations waste time getting drowned in high volumes of alerts and false positives. They don’t do risk-based vulnerability management and rely on old threat intelligence. They don’t know what impact risks can have on their organization. Learn about vulnerability management vs risk management here.
• Ignoring infrastructure visibility – Not cataloging assets and managing inventory are other issues. Shadow IT, unmanaged devices, and cloud misconfigurations can blur visibility and not give complete transparency. Lack of asset visibility also creates new blindspots and emerging risks.

Vulnerability Management Benefits

Here are some of the key vulnerability management benefits for companies:

• Good vulnerability management can improve your organizations operational efficiency. It takes less to get more work done without compromising security.
• Vulnerability management enhances visibility and reveals the state of your cloud security posture. It streamlines compliance management and makes sure you adhere to the latest regulatory frameworks.
• It reduces the risk of potential data breaches, minimizes downtimes, and optimizes resource allocation. You reduce the time taken to find and mitigate emerging threats.
• Real-time reporting features, increased ROI on security investments, and reduced long-term costs are some of the other benefits of vulnerability management.
• You can hire vulnerability management services to get human insights on top security automation. These are expert professionals who review alerts manually and provide additional help that technology can’t provide. Vulnerability management as a service can provide customized help, reduce security risks, and provide various benefits. The best part is no commitment or fixed subscription, you can hire help for the necessary workloads or size of your organization as needed.

Learn about the difference between vulnerability management vs. vulnerability assessment here.

Common Types of Vulnerabilities

If someone disgruntled or inside your organizations steals, leaks, or hijacks sensitive data or accounts, then that can be an insider threat. Insider threats can occur anytime and there is no clear detection mechanism for them. Even the most trusted user can become an insider threat which is the scary part.

You can face other common types of vulnerabilities in your organization such as weak passwords, broken authentication, API security issues, bugs, and unauthorized file access. Social engineering and phishing are prevalent these days. A common vulnerability faced by organizations is outdated software and hardware. Many organizations forget to patch and update their components. They don’t look out for remote code execution, buffer overflows, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks. Poor data sanitization, credentials abuse, and hidden malware within systems are also other common types of vulnerabilities that exist.

The difference between attack surface management vs vulnerability management is that attack surface management looks for all the ways an attacker can potentially gain entry into data and systems. Vulnerability management prioritizes only the vulnerabilities found in an organization’s apps and systems. So in that sense, attack surface management tools provide wider coverage than vulnerability management tools and services.

Vulnerability Management Best Practices

Here are some of the best practices for effective vulnerability management:

• Factor all IT assets and networks – Make a comprehensive inventory of all your IT assets and networks. Hardware, software, systems, data, everything.  Make sure you’ve installed the latest security fixes, patches, and updates as soon as they’re released.
• Make a vulnerability management process policy –  This will serve as guidelines for your organization. Your vulnerability management process policy will outline the roles and responsibilities of each team member. It will also set clear expectations on how to report and communicate with stakeholders and board members about upcoming or pending threats.
• Use high-quality threat intelligence feeds – Good threat intelligence can supply your security team with real-time information on new exploits, vulnerabilities, and threats. It will help you stay ahead by including diverse threat types and sources. You can extract insights from their behaviors and understand them better.
• Do regular penetration testing – Regular penetration testing can help you learn about your security’s strengths and weaknesses. You’ll be better equipped with the ability to defend against incoming threats. You will also get insights on how to tackle new threat actors and potential adversaries who are capable of infiltrating systems. It will help you assess the impact of potential data breaches as well and validate your current security posture.
• Apply network segmentation – Network segmentation is useful for quarantining threats and isolates IoT devices. You can get timely notifications about vulnerabilities and understand specific risks associated with these devices. Network segmentation can limit the potential damages in the event of security compromises.

AI Vulnerability Management: The Future of Automated Risk Detection

AI vulnerability scanners fill in the gaps that humans can’t. Sometimes you’re just tired or miss errors. Automated real-time detection with these tools can enhance your responses, plus you get machine-driven insights. You get the benefits of continuous monitoring, behavioral analysis, risk-based prioritization, automated threat detection, and more. AI in vulnerability management can analyze attack paths and provide contextual insights to security teams. It focuses on actual threats and filters out false positives, thus reducing alert fatigue.

Some of these AI vulnerability management tools can also integrate with SIEM, SOAR, and EDR solutions. In the future, we can expect self-learning AI models that can adapt to emerging threats, enhanced deep learning algorithms for spotting zero-day exploits better, and greater integrations with security ecosystems.

Vulnerability Management with SentinelOne

Singularity™ Vulnerability Management can discover unknown network assets, close blind spots, and prioritize vulnerabilities using your existing SentinelOne agents. It builds the foundation for autonomous enterprise security. You can use its automated controls to streamline IT and security workflows, isolate unmanaged endpoints, and close visibility gaps. It delivers continuous and real-time visibility into application and OS vulnerabilities across Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. SentinelOne reduces the likelihood of exploitation and blends passive and active scanning to identify and fingerprint devices. It provides customizable scan policies that you can control and align with your business needs. You also get unmatched granular controls.

Conclusion

Companies face a variety of cyber and cloud security risks these days. Your vulnerabilities don’t exist online only, they can lurk within your infrastructure. Now you understand vulnerability management in detail and know what it takes to mitigate threats. SentinelOne can help you on your vulnerability management journey, so feel free to get in touch with us. We’re here to help. Our solutions can also assist with doing audits of your current security posture and more.