A Sound Guide to Vulnerability Management

Quick Summary: Managing vulnerabilities is critical for securing your digital landscape by detecting and resolving security flaws and misconfigurations. It is a comprehensive process consisting of vulnerability assessment, remediation, and reporting. Keep reading for a thorough understanding of vulnerability management.

Attackers are always looking for an opportunity to break into a system and steal data. Vulnerabilities are the common reasons for most cyberattacks. They offer the opportunity that attackers can exploit to breach the security of your systems. Therefore, finding and resolving vulnerabilities is critical for the security of an organization’s digital systems.

Vulnerability management is a process that aims to identify, categorize, and prioritize vulnerabilities. It is a combination of tools, practices, and techniques to manage vulnerabilities. The process begins by identifying vulnerabilities with a vulnerability scanner then comes prioritization and remediation.

Organizations need to adopt this process to defend their digital assets from the rising threats of cyberattacks. It provides the right steps to discover potential weaknesses in your systems, applications, or networks and fix them to avoid cyberattacks.

In this blog, we will explore more about vulnerability management, its benefits, and various phases of this process. Let’s dive into the details.

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What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management is a continuous process of identifying, assessing, reporting, and remediating security flaws and misconfigurations in software and systems. It aims to unearth all potential weaknesses in a software application or system and fix them to avoid data breaches and cyberattacks. It is a vital process for organizations to identify potential security risks and minimize the attack surface.

Why is Vulnerability Management So Important for Organizations?

Securing data is not only a moral obligation but a legal obligation as well. Organizations must fulfill various compliances that protect individual data. Besides data protection, reputation is also an important factor in data security. Vulnerability management helps you identify security loopholes and fix them to fulfill your commitments to data safety.

The following are some of the major vulnerability management benefits.

Enhanced Security

Security flaws in the form of vulnerabilities offer an opportunity for attackers to penetrate your systems and steal data. These vulnerabilities can compromise your system’s security and allow attackers to access unauthorized resources. With thorough application and API security testing, these vulnerabilities can be identified and patched.

Organizations can strengthen the security of their systems by regularly scanning for vulnerabilities and patching them on time. Identifying and fixing vulnerabilities regularly will make it hard for an attacker to exploit your systems. With vulnerability management, they can discover weak spots and beef up their security postures.

Uninterrupted Operations

By understanding and identifying vulnerabilities, organizations can avoid disruptions in business operations arising from cyberattacks. They can identify causes of disruptions promptly, leading to reduced downtime.

Cyberattacks not only cause financial losses, but they can also disrupt your business. For example, a DoS attack can disrupt or overload your application or network with excessive traffic and disrupt your operations.

Vulnerabilities in your applications or systems can cause such types of attacks that will impact overall business operations due to downtime. Vulnerability management provides the steps and methods to find and fix vulnerabilities before they impact your organization.

Reporting

Creating a vulnerability report for hundreds of assets of an organization is a hectic process. Security teams will require immense time and effort to accomplish this task. The traditional approach with vulnerability data from one scan to another is quite complex and time-consuming.

Vulnerability management helps to get accurate and centralized reports that show the status of an organization’s security posture. The report provides complete visibility into the threat landscape and offers severity levels of various security flaws.

The report highlights security risks and their severity level. You must verify whether your current security posture is able to defend against emerging cyberattacks or requires upgrades. Continuous vulnerability scanning helps you identify weak spots in the security posture and fix them to improve security.

User Trust

The vulnerability management process is crucial to identify security risks that can compromise personally identifiable information of the users of your applications. When there is a security breach, it not only impacts your business but also affects your reputation. Users who use your applications will find it hard to trust you and can even switch to competitors.

Identifying and managing vulnerabilities is crucial to secure your systems and applications. It helps to protect the personally identifiable information of your users. As a result, the users will have greater confidence in your business and will earn their trust.

How Does Vulnerability Management Work?

The following are the four steps of managing vulnerabilities.

Discover Vulnerabilities

First, you need a good security testing tool to identify vulnerabilities across your digital assets. You can discover a wide range of vulnerabilities like OWASP Top 10 with a robust web app and API vulnerability scanner. It simplifies the process and helps detect flaws that lead to cyberattacks.

Assess Vulnerabilities

The next step is evaluating the detected vulnerabilities. It is crucial to ensure that the vulnerabilities that have been identified by a vulnerability scanner are real. Hence, after identifying the vulnerabilities, they must be validated, categorized based on the type of risk, and prioritized based on the severity level.

Remediate Vulnerabilities

After evaluation, organizations can remediate the vulnerabilities that involve fixing or patching them. However, the organization can either fully patch or fix vulnerabilities or they can mitigate the associated risks when it’s not possible. Remediation helps to eliminate the risks related to cyberattacks.

Report Vulnerabilities

After remediation, the final step involves documenting or reporting the known vulnerabilities. This will help the IT team track trends in vulnerabilities and help them comply with various security standards and regulations.

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What are the Different Vulnerability Management Tools?

Detecting and managing vulnerabilities requires specialized tools designed to identify and report known vulnerabilities. These are vulnerability scanners that scan software applications to uncover potential vulnerabilities. DAST and SAST are the two types of tools used in discovering and managing vulnerabilities.

SAST (Static Application Security Testing) is a testing technique in which source code is analyzed to detect vulnerabilities. It scans applications from inside and it is performed at the early stage of an SDLC. SAST tools can help to identify a myriad of vulnerabilities like input validation flaws, buffer overflow, XXE (XML external entity), and more.

DAST or Dynamic Application Security Testing is a security testing method in which applications are tested when in the running state. DAST tools perform vulnerability scanning from outside and don’t scan the source code. These tools perform simulated attacks on applications to identify vulnerabilities.

These tools can detect different types of vulnerabilities, including OWASP Top 10 and CWE-25. Choosing the right tool is crucial for your vulnerability management program to effectively identify and resolve vulnerabilities. The comparison of DAST vs SAST can help you understand which type of vulnerability scanning tool is suitable for your requirements.

What is the Vulnerability Management Lifecycle?

Since vulnerability management is a continuous process, there are different phases that security teams go through when performing it. The following are the different phases of the vulnerability management lifecycle.

Discovery

Discover all assets across your organization. Creating an all-inclusive asset inventory is the first phase of the vulnerability management lifecycle. Organizations need a holistic view of their assets to identify the entire threat landscape and mitigate cybersecurity risks effectively. This step is crucial to identify assets with critical vulnerabilities that require immediate attention.

Assessment

This phase includes evaluating the vulnerabilities and analyzing their potential impact. Security teams determine the risk profile of every asset and classify the vulnerabilities. Automated vulnerability scanners are used to evaluate assets, such as software applications, to identify and categorize vulnerabilities. This phase helps to determine the exploitability of each vulnerability.

Prioritization

Determine the severity of each asset group and prioritize them accordingly. The security team evaluates vulnerabilities and organizes them according to those that need immediate attention. Prioritization is a crucial step in addressing vulnerabilities that helps take the right steps further.

Reporting

Typically, automated vulnerability scanning platforms provide a dashboard that reports on potential vulnerabilities. The report highlights the list of vulnerabilities detected and indexes them according to the level of severity. Besides this, it also provides suggestions for fixing the vulnerabilities. Vulnerability scanners use a database of known vulnerabilities to identify security issues.

Resolution

After assessing and prioritizing vulnerabilities, the next phase involves treating vulnerabilities that pose a critical risk for the organization. Security teams can use the following approaches to resolve vulnerabilities.

• Remediation: It involves fully fixing the vulnerability to eliminate the risk of exploitation. For example, installing a patch to fix a respective software bug or retiring a vulnerable asset can fix the vulnerability completely. Remediation is an ideal step when it comes to addressing vulnerabilities because it minimizes the risks of cyberattacks to near zero. It helps to remove the potential loopholes more precisely.
• Mitigation: When it’s not possible to fully fix the vulnerability, mitigation comes as a handy way to handle the problem. It involves minimizing the impact of exploitation and reducing the likelihood of an attack. It aims to defend digital assets from a potential attack without entirely removing the vulnerability. Hence, it works by mitigating the risk of cyberattacks with appropriate actions. Mitigation is used when there is no patch or any other means of remediation possible.
• Acceptance: In simple words, it’s a decision to leave the vulnerability as it is without addressing it. So, these vulnerabilities are identified and accepted without providing a fix or patching them. Usually, vulnerabilities with a low severity level are accepted as they are deemed to cause no significant harm to an organization’s systems. The decision is taken considering the high cost of fixing the low-risk vulnerabilities compared to the cost of exploitation when they are not fixed.

Reassessment

Security teams conduct a reassessment to ensure that their remediation efforts are successful and don’t introduce new vulnerabilities. A rescan for vulnerabilities is crucial to confirm that all vulnerabilities have been fully fixed.

Vulnerability Management vs Vulnerability Assessment

Vulnerability management is a comprehensive process and vulnerability assessment is a part of it. Vulnerability assessment involves identifying, classifying, and prioritizing vulnerabilities. On the other hand, vulnerability management involves the entire process of vulnerability assessment as well as evaluating, treating, and reporting on vulnerabilities. It is a continuous cycle and involves the remediation of identified vulnerabilities.

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In Conclusion

Securing your digital assets has become tougher than before as cyberattacks are becoming more complex and frequent. Regularly scanning your digital systems for vulnerabilities and patching them on time is the best way to stay abreast of cyber threats.

Time is a critical factor when it comes to security testing and managing vulnerabilities. The more accurate and actionable your vulnerability assessment report is, the better the chances of mitigating security risks. You can leverage an intelligent vulnerability scanner like ZeroThreat to get accurate results about vulnerabilities and fix security weaknesses before they get exploited.

ZeroThreat is best suited for AppSec teams to quickly identify vulnerabilities and reduce efforts in manual pen testing by 90%. It can be seamlessly integrated into SDLC for continuous security testing and detect vulnerabilities with high precision and near-zero false positives. Try ZeroThreat for free and uncover potential weaknesses before they get exploited.