What is Vulnerability Management and Why Does Your Enterprise Need It?

Vulnerability management is an ongoing process that is usually performed by IT security teams to eliminate vulnerabilities that pose severe threats to an organization. VM is crucial as its goal is to eliminate vulnerabilities that can open and enterprise’s networks up to attack. The process consists of a few critical steps that together, provide an enterprise with appropriate coverage from attack.

• Identify: An enterprise needs to identify all of its IT assets across the environment. These IT assets can range from routers, printers, servers, scanners, and other various types of connected devices. Following their identification, they are then correlated to continuously updated vulnerability databases to identify security threats, vulnerabilities, backdoors, and misconfigurations. 
• Prioritization: Once all IT assets are accounted for, IT security teams need to categorize the devices according to their importance to the enterprise and assign risk-based prioritization. 
• Risk Assessment: A risk baseline for found vulnerabilities needs to be created and remediated accordingly. While VM solutions will produce long lists of discovered vulnerabilities and assign them to risk ratings, such as Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores, these vulnerabilities still need further assessment. For example, are the vulnerabilities real or false positives, are they exploitable, and are the devices affected by these vulnerabilities essential to business processes?
• Plan of Action: Once vulnerabilities are assessed, security teams need to decide on the best plan of action for handling them. There are several ways a security team can address discovered vulnerabilities:
  • Remediation would mean completely patching it to prevent exploitation.
  • Mitigation would reduce the chances of the vulnerability being exploited. Mitigation is used when full remediation isn’t always a possibility. 
  • Acceptance, where no action is taken because either the vulnerability is of low threat, or the cost of fixing the vulnerability would outweigh any repercussions of the vulnerability being exploited.