Helping you identify, classify, remediate, and mitigate vulnerabilities—before attackers do.
Explore InsightVMMassive breaches have caused many companies to pursue stronger, more proactive measures for managing vulnerabilities in their environments. Yet, as corporate infrastructures have become more complex—encompassing the cloud and spanning vast attack surfaces—businesses have found it more difficult to achieve complete visibility into the rapidly proliferating vulnerabilities across their ecosystems. Capitalizing on the opportunity, cybercriminals have learned how to exploit chains of weaknesses in systems, applications, and people.
Vulnerability management programs address today’s modern cybersecurity challenges by instituting a comprehensive and continuous process for identifying, classifying, remediating, and mitigating vulnerabilities before attackers can take advantage of them.
At the heart of these vulnerability management programs is often a vulnerability scanner that automatically assesses and understands risk across an entire infrastructure, generating easy-to-understand reports that help businesses properly and rapidly prioritize the vulnerabilities they must remediate or mitigate.
A vulnerability scanner automates the vulnerability management process, typically breaking it down into the following four steps. It’s important to note that a good vulnerability management process should continually scan for vulnerabilities as they are introduced into the environment, as circumstances can quickly change.
The first and most essential step in any vulnerability process, of course, is to bring to light all of the vulnerabilities that may exist across your environment. A vulnerability scanner goes about this by scanning the full range of accessible systems that exist—from laptops, desktops, and servers on to databases, firewalls, switches, printers, and beyond.
From there, the vulnerability scanner identifies any open ports and services that are running on those systems, logging in to those systems and gathering detailed information where possible before correlating the information it obtains with known vulnerabilities. This insight can be used to create reports, metrics, and dashboards for a variety of audiences.
Once you’ve identified all the vulnerabilities across your environment, you’ll need to evaluate them in order to appropriately deal with the risks they pose according to your organization’s cybersecurity risk management strategy. Different vulnerability management solutions use different risk ratings and scores for vulnerabilities, but one commonly referenced framework for new programs is the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
Vulnerability scores can help organizations determine how to prioritize the vulnerabilities they’ve discovered, it’s important to also consider other factors to form a complete understanding of the true risk posed by any given vulnerability. It’s also worth noting that vulnerability scanners can generate false positives in rare instances, thus underscoring the necessity of including other considerations in addition to risk scores at this stage of the process.
After you’ve prioritized the vulnerabilities that you’ve found, it’s important to promptly treat them in collaboration with your original business or network stakeholders. Depending on the vulnerability in question, treatment usually proceeds according to one of the following three paths:
When determining specific treatment strategies, it is best for an organization’s security team, system owners, and system administrators to come together and determine the right remediation approach—whether that’s issuing a software patch or refreshing a fleet of physical servers.
Once remediation is considered complete, it’s wise to run another vulnerability scan to make sure that the vulnerability has, in fact, been effectively remediated or mitigated.
Improving the speed and accuracy with which you detect and treat vulnerabilities is essential to managing the risk that they represent, which is why many organizations continually assess the efficacy of their vulnerability management program. They can take advantage of the visual reporting capabilities found in vulnerability management solutions for this purpose.
Armed with the insights needed, IT teams can identify which remediation techniques will help them fix the most vulnerabilities with the least amount of effort. Security teams, for their part, can use this reporting to monitor vulnerability trends over time and communicate their risk reduction progress to leadership.
Ideal solutions will include integrations with IT ticketing systems and patch management to accelerate the process of sharing information between teams. This helps customers make meaningful progress toward reducing their risk. Businesses can also use these assessments to fulfill their compliance and regulatory requirements.
Businesses face growing risks as the attack surface continues to expand, increasing the number of vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit. Vulnerability management programs give companies a framework for managing these risks at scale, detecting vulnerabilities across the entire environment with greater speed. Meanwhile, analytics help organizations continually optimize the techniques they use for remediation.
With a strong vulnerability management program or managed vulnerability management (MVM) in place, businesses can better address the risks they face not only today but well into the future.