Fears and Frights: Unmasking the scary truth about vulnerability management

To say vulnerability management is spooky is an understatement. With a new vulnerability published every 17 minutes, security teams are overwhelmed and always playing catch up.

Many organizations have vulnerability scanners, but with over one million vulnerabilities in their networks, they are still left with a scary volume of critical or high-severity vulnerabilities with no further context to help them prioritize.

This is why organizations are turning to a risk-based vulnerability management tool. Threat-centric vulnerability management enables organizations to more accurately prioritize the threats that pose the greatest risk to their organization. Using vulnerability prioritization technology, organizations better understand the most critical threats in their network and maximize their team’s efforts.

Here are five reasons why you should move to a threat-centric vulnerability management program to better manage your risk:

(1) It considers the severity of the vulnerability

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) has long been an industry standard for vulnerability prioritization. While they’ve made some great updates with their CVSS 4.0 scoring, using this method alone still leaves teams with an overwhelming list of critical or high-severity alerts.

(2) It considers the exploitability of a vulnerability

While many vulnerabilities are considered critical or high, most will never be a real risk. Considering the exploitability of a vulnerability (i.e. if it’s already got a PoC) allows you to focus on the vulnerabilities that pose a true risk to your organization.

(3) It considers the asset’s importance

Is the asset a laptop for the CMO, or is it the server that handles all your financial transactions? Knowing where the vulnerability lies and understanding the criticality of that asset helps security teams prioritize vulnerability remediations more accurately.

(4) It considers the business impact

Like the asset’s importance, it’s critical to understand the business impact. If your financial server crashes or your manufacturing teams shut down because your OT networks have been compromised, this could significantly impact your business. Quantifying your business risk in financial terms will help prioritize vulnerability remediations more accurately.

(5) It considers the accessibility of the asset

If the asset is critical AND the vulnerability is exploitable, then what? The next thing to check is if the asset is exposed through your integrated attack surface management tools. This enables you to understand if and how an attacker could reach an asset hosting a vulnerability across the network. Understanding network exposure helps ensure you remediate those accessible risks first.

While vulnerability management may be tricky, with the right risk-based vulnerability prioritization technology in place, you reduce the noise and focus your team’s efforts on the vulnerabilities likely to impact your organization most. Good vulnerability remediation software will also provide alternative compensating controls so that you have ways to mitigate risk if immediate patching isn’t feasible. Using this threat-centric approach to vulnerability management helps organizations significantly improve efficiencies and reduce risk.

Skybox’s Vulnerability Control gives organizations full visibility of their attack surface to prioritize vulnerability remediations, including “unscannable” assets more accurately. It also provides a list of compensating controls, such as software upgrades, IPS signatures, or firewall rules, to help further mitigate risk.