What is Vulnerability Management?
To proactively address vulnerabilities before they are leveraged, organizations should perform comprehensive vulnerability management.
Vulnerability management is a security practice specifically designed to identify, evaluate, treat, and report any IT vulnerabilities that could potentially harm any digital asset or system. It is a dynamic process that requires stakeholders to detect new vulnerabilities and mitigate them through the patching and configuration of security settings.
Threat management is a reactive process whereas vulnerability management is a proactive process focused on prevention versus a fix.
What is considered a vulnerability?
A vulnerability is any weak point in an organization’s infrastructure or network through which external threat factors gain unauthorized access or control of an application, service, endpoint, or server. For example, the most common software security vulnerabilities include missing authentication for critical functions, absent authorization, missing data encryption, OS command injection, unrestricted upload of suspicious file types, and buffer overflow.
While various security vendors have their own vulnerability and risk mitigation definitions, vulnerability management is often seen as an open, standards-based effort that uses the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP). At an advanced level, SCAP can be broken down into a four components:
- Common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) – Each CVE represents a specific vulnerability through which a cyber-attack may occur. The Strobes library is already aware of these risks and is capable of identifying them instantly.
- Common configuration enumeration (CCE) – A CCE is a list of system security configuration issues used to develop configuration guidance. Strobes is capable of identifying and registering these unique identifiers of system configuration issues that might become vulnerabilities.
- Common platform enumeration (CPE) – CPEs are standardized methods of defining classes of applications, operating systems, and devices within your environment. CPEs are used to describe what a CVE or CCE applies to. These are the end-points, i.e., digital systems, devices, that are vulnerable.
- Common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) – CVSS works to assign severity scores to each defined vulnerability, which is used to prioritize remediation efforts. Scores range from zero to ten, with ten being the most severe. Strobes’ dynamic scoring ensures you’re solving the most pressing vulnerabilities first.
Strobes streamlines vulnerability management by correlating vulnerabilities from multiple sources, automatically de-duplicating and simplifying prioritization of those findings using threat intelligence. Strobes provides actionable insights into the full security health index of your organization with a single login.
The Vulnerability Management Process
Each new vulnerability can introduce multiple risks to an organization; hence, there’s usually a defined process employed to provide organizations with an effective way to continually discover and address vulnerabilities. With Strobes, the vulnerability management process consists of six sub processes and tasks:
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- Strobes’ Connector Library consists of more than 45 connectors covering your entire security stack from vulnerability scanners (SAST, DAST, Network), internal security team, external security vendors, bug bounty programs, and many more. We currently support more than 30 vendors providing a comprehensive view of your vulnerability landscape within Strobes..
- Strobes uncovers your entire threat landscape and identifies the vulnerabilities in your digital ecosystem. With Strobes, you can upload all your business units, assets, and vulnerability reports, as well as bridge the gap between multiple teams – such as security, DevOps, and IT – to manage all asset risks on a single platform.
- Strobes is empowered with AI to analyze and deduplicate the vulnerabilities, thus, significantly reducing the number of data discrepancies and data-related organizational mishaps.
- The deduplicated vulnerabilities are scored using our unique Scoring Engine. We use eight scoring parameters including Exploit Availability, Vulnerability Age, and Patch Availability, to produce the final vulnerability score. This score acts as a uniform language for different teams to understand the priority, impact, and risks posed by each vulnerability. The asset sensitivity, business contextualization, and SLAs (spell out Service Level Agreement (SLA) ensure that the teams are fixing the right vulnerability.
- After prioritization and scoring, Strobes can automate tedious processes to increase human and technological productivity. From scheduling your quarterly scans to triggering remote scans right from your Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline , Strobes automates and manages all of these time consuming activities.
- Strobes shows real ROI detailing the improvement of your organization’s vulnerability management structure. CXOs get clear data on parameters like Security Health Risk, Organization Risk Score, Average Turnaround Time of resolution, and many more through customizable reports. These parameters help executives make intelligent decisions to improve the security risk structure of the organization.
Strobes sees each sub-process as a cycle designed to improve security and reduce organizational risk found in the digital environment.
Vulnerability Management Solutions
Strobes supports integrations (should these be with the connectors above?) with various tools such as Burp Suite, Veracode, Nexcode, and many others to import data that can be mapped to write-ups and fill in reports. We also make sure that any potential or existing threats to the assets in your analytics module are instantly addressed.
The vulnerability management process is chaotic. Pilot Strobes to simplify and automate the entire process.
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