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.

What is RBVM & How it Differs from Traditional Scanning?

Risk-based vulnerability management takes into account risks that your organization faces before mitigating various vulnerabilities. You identify, rank them, and prioritize these vulnerabilities based on their level of severity. Unlike traditional vulnerability management, risk-based vulnerability management will incorporate contextual factors. These include things such as: the likelihood of vulnerabilities being exploited, insights about current cyber attack tactics and trends, and asset criticality.

Traditional vulnerability scanning will look for all vulnerabilities. But RBVM will dial down and reduce wasted effort by focusing on the most critical issues. It weeds out low-risk issues as well and provides quicker response times, thus leading to greater operational efficiency.

An example of RBVM in action when compared to traditional vulnerability scanning is when it would patch a less severe vulnerability first. That vulnerability could be a critical customer-facing web server which may have higher potential business impact tied to assets connected to it. If those assets get compromised, then the low vulnerability becomes something very severe later. Traditional vulnerability scanning would miss this and just focus on technical severity scores such as CVSS. Risk-based vulnerability management will consider your business’s asset criticality and factor in real-world threat intelligence.

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:

• Asset Discovery & Inventory – It involves mapping all devices, applications, and services across your network using automated discovery tools and asset sensors. You track hardware specifications, software versions, and configuration states to identify shadow IT and unmanaged assets that could become potential attack vectors so that you can remediate them.
• Vulnerability Scanning & Assessment – You probe systems for security flaws using credential-based scans and network testing to identify missing patches, misconfigurations, and weak authentication. These scans compare your software versions against CVE databases to detect known vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them.
• Risk Prioritization – You rank vulnerabilities based on exploitability scores, asset criticality, and business impact rather than just severity ratings. Your prioritization process weighs CVSS scores against EPSS data and threat intelligence to address the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited in your environment.
• Remediation & Mitigation – This component applies patches, configuration changes, and compensating controls to eliminate security weaknesses while maintaining system availability. Your remediation workflow will include testing, deployment scheduling, and rollback procedures. It will address vulnerabilities without disrupting business operations.
• Verification & Reporting – Validate that applied fixes resolve identified vulnerabilities through re-scanning and configuration verification. Reports will document remediation progress, compliance status, and security metrics for stakeholders while maintaining audit trails for regulatory requirements
• Continuous Monitoring – Continuous monitoring is about maintaining real-time surveillance of your environment to detect new vulnerabilities and configuration drift as they occur. Your monitoring system automatically identifies newly connected devices. It monitors for software changes, and emerging threats to keep your vulnerability program current so that it doesn’t need any manual intervention.

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 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. If you’re dealing with a lack of network visibility, you can rely on Singularity™ Network Discovery. You can set customizable scanning policies and learn when unauthorized devices appear on sensitive networks. It is easy to implement in your network and policies provide control over scan intervals, including what should be scanned and what must never be scanned. It reveals vital information about IP-enabled devices and produces inventories in seconds across your region or the globe.

Vulnerability Management Benefits

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

• Operational efficiency: Good vulnerability management can improve your organization’s operational efficiency. It takes less to get more work done without compromising security.
• Stronger security posture: 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.
• Risk reduction: 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: Real-time reporting features, increased ROI on security investments, and reduced long-term costs are some of the other benefits of vulnerability management.
• Security automation and human expertise: 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.
• Flexible and scalable services: 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

Here are the most common types of vulnerabilities you should be aware of:

Software Vulnerabilities

Common software vulnerabilities you may encounter are cross-site scripting, SQL injection, unpatched systems, reused or weak passwords, IDOR, etc. You may not have proper error handling mechanisms or 2FA in place. Broken authentication, unpatched software, lack of updates, insecure deserialization, and outdated code are among other common software vulnerabilities. You may also deal with vulnerable APIs, cryptographic failures, and server-side request forgery. Software and data integrity failures are also there.

Network Vulnerabilities

When it comes to common network vulnerabilities, we mostly deal with technical ones. Think poorly configured devices, no firewalling, and networks that are left open and exposed to unauthorized access. Your network may be infected by malware, viruses, worms, and Trojans. Zero-day network security vulnerabilities are hard to identify and slip through the cracks. Even vendors aren’t aware of them.

Then there are issues such as poorly secured Wi-Fi access, network misconfigurations, outdated network security software or unpatched flaws, etc. Attackers can also flood networks with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and Man-in-the-Middle attacks where they intercept communication between two or more parties operating on these networks.

Human 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.

The other side of human vulnerabilities is human error. Employees may lack training, awareness, and easily fall prey to the most common phishing and social engineering schemes. They may not know that they’re engaging with adversaries and accidentally leak sensitive data during conversations or digital interactions.

Physical Vulnerabilities

Physical vulnerabilities are things you just can’t control within or from outside your organization. For example, if a natural disaster strikes and your data centers go offline, then it’s not your or anyone’s fault. If you are located in close proximity to crime zones where break-ins happen for physical facilities, then you’re introducing the risk of hardware damages and device theft.

Lack of poor infrastructure planning can lead to faulty equipment, poor connections, and physical workflows that don’t work as intended. The thing is, physical vulnerabilities are tied to the other types of vulnerabilities. If they are left unaddressed, these external agents can disrupt your business operations and bring things to a complete halt unexpectedly one day.

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. Singularity™ Threat Intelligence can help you get a better understanding of your threat landscape and proactively identify adversaries to reduce risks in environments.
• 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.

Singularity™ Cloud Workload Security is the #1 ranked CWPP. SentinelOne CWPP supports containers, Kubernetes, virtual machines, physical servers, and serverless. It can secure public, private, hybrid, and on-prem environments. Basically, CWPP takes care of all your cloud workload vulnerabilities and issues related to them. SentinelOne’s Singularity™ Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) supports agentless deployment in minutes. You can easily assess compliance and eliminate misconfigurations.

Singularity™ Endpoint can detect endpoint security vulnerabilities and provide AI-powered protection for endpoints, identities, and more. It can address siloed surfaces, reduce the burden on overtaxed teams, and stop attacks with its machine-speed defenses. You can protect mobile devices from zero-day malware, phishing, and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. And it can also detect ransomware with its behavioral and static AI models to analyze anomalous behaviors. If you’d like to correlate across all attack surfaces, understand the full context of attacks, and get comprehensive endpoint security coverage that goes beyond mere endpoint protection, then you can use the Singularity™ XDR Platform.

And if you would like to really secure your organization against all potential threats, then you should pick a holistic security solution like SentinelOne Singularity™ Cloud Security. Its an agentless CNAPP that bundles various security features such as Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), External Attack and Surface Management (EASM), Secrets Scanning, IaC Scanning, SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM), and more.

SentinelOne’s CNAPP can scan container registries, images, repositories, and IaC templates. You can perform agentless vulnerability scanning and use its 1,000+ out-of-the-box and custom rules. It protects your Kubernetes clusters and workloads, reducing human error and minimizing manual intervention. SentinelOne’s CNAPP can also manage cloud entitlements. It can tighten permissions and prevent secrets leakage. You can detect up to 750+ different types of secrets. Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) provides full forensic telemetry. You get incident response from experts and it comes with a pre-built and customizable detection library too.

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.