Why Do You Need Vulnerability Management?

A 2020 Forrester Global Security Survey revealed that 49% of organizations experienced one or more breaches within a year, with software vulnerabilities playing a significant role. Moreover, in 2019, 22,316 new security flaws were discovered, and over a third of them had known exploits. This highlights the necessity of incorporating vulnerability management into a cybersecurity strategy.

Since a single vulnerability can lead to data breaches, managing and prioritizing vulnerabilities is one of the top 10 security controls recommended by the Center for Internet Security (CIS).

Vulnerability Management Process

Vulnerability management typically follows these steps:

1. Asset Discovery – Identify and catalog all assets within your network.
2. Vulnerability Scanning – Conduct scans to detect potential vulnerabilities.
3. Assessment – Assess vulnerabilities based on risk factors, such as severity and exploit availability.
4. Prioritization – Prioritize vulnerabilities by their potential impact and urgency.
5. Remediation Planning – Develop a remediation strategy, often through patching or reconfiguring systems.
6. Execution – Apply the necessary patches or mitigations.
7. Verification – Verify that the remediation is effective.
8. Reporting – Generate reports to track the status of vulnerabilities and remediation efforts.

Prioritization for Effective Patching

Vulnerability Manager Plus provides several capabilities to ensure critical vulnerabilities are addressed:

• Identifying vulnerabilities with severity scores.
• Knowing whether exploit code is publicly available.
• Monitoring how long a vulnerability has been in the network.
• Filtering vulnerabilities by their impact and available patches.
• Recommendations for handling high-priority vulnerabilities.
• Special attention to critical assets, including databases and web servers.