As organizations extend their digital capabilities and adopt more complex tech infrastructures, cybersecurity risks become more difficult to manage. An expanding attack surface means more opportunities for attackers to access critical systems and cause untold damage to your business.
In this context, implementing an effective vulnerability management process is more important than ever. Vulnerability management plays an essential role in proactively identifying, assessing and remediating weaknesses in your IT systems. But how do you ensure it delivers real benefits for your cybersecurity efforts?
In this post, we’ll look at the vulnerability management best practices you should adopt to strengthen your security posture and streamline your processes.
What Is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management consists of the processes required to resolve weaknesses in an organization’s network.
A vulnerability management program provides IT security teams with a framework for maintaining complete visibility and control of their organization’s security posture, so they can resolve issues as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Ultimately, the goal of vulnerability management is to minimize an organization’s attack surface and reduce risk.
Why is Vulnerability Management Important?
Vulnerability management is an essential part of an organization’s IT security strategy. It offers a range of key benefits, including:
- Timely remediation. Helping IT security teams ensure that critical issues are discovered, analysed, and remediated as quickly and efficiently as possible.
- Resource allocation. Effective vulnerability management provides a framework for security teams to assess and prioritise vulnerabilities, ensuring they focus on the most critical issues.
- Continuous improvement. The cyclical process of vulnerability management helps security teams assess and measure their security posture on a continuous basis so critical issues aren’t left unaddressed.
To learn more about how vulnerability management works and the impact it can have on your cybersecurity efforts, take a look at our in-depth guide to vulnerability management.
7 Vulnerability Management Program Best Practices
1. Establish an Effective Vulnerability Management Process
Effective vulnerability management requires a holistic and integrated approach. If you lack a clearly defined vulnerability management process, your organization may fail to identify critical issues until it’s too late.
A comprehensive vulnerability management process should include the following 7 stages:
- Discover. Identify threats and vulnerabilities within your organization’s network by carrying out regular penetration tests and vulnerability scans.
- Consolidate. Centralize your threat and vulnerability assessment results in one place. Vulnerability management systems can make this process effortless.
- Assess. Analyse your security issues in line with cyber threat intelligence, such as exploit databases, to establish their severity, the likelihood that they will be exploited, and the impact they could have on your organization.
- Prioritize. Assign severity scores to your assets in line with your analysis, and other factors such as resource availability.
- Remediate. Carry out your threat and vulnerability management program to resolve vulnerabilities in line with your organization’s priorities.
- Re-assess. Verify whether your remediation efforts have been successful. Ultimately, your threat and vulnerability management remediation process should reduce business risk.
- Visualize and improve. Continuously improve your vulnerability management strategy, resolve any bottlenecks and ensure compliance with your organization’s SLAs. For example, could you reduce your time-to-remediate (TTR)?
Implemented effectively, this process will help you continuously refine your approach to vulnerability management and ensure your organization stays protected as the threat landscape shifts.
2. Embrace Continuous Vulnerability Management
If your security assessments take periodically – once a quarter, for instance – your organization is exposed in the interval. New vulnerabilities could emerge at any time, while pre-existing vulnerabilities could become more critical – and you won’t be prepared to confront these new threats.
Instead, adopting continuous vulnerability management practices will help you keep pace with potential attackers. You will be able to identify, assess and monitor vulnerabilities as they emerge, adapting your processes based on the latest threat data.
3. Adopt An Intelligence-Driven Approach
Threat intelligence enables IT security teams to gain context for their issues, prioritize effectively, and accurately evaluate risk. By providing up-to-date information about active threats and the real-world behaviour of attackers, it focuses your remediation efforts on the most pressing issues.
With this in mind, a process for gathering and referencing relevant cyber threat intelligence should be integrated with an organization’s vulnerability management life cycle. This will not only help with risk scoring and prioritization (see below), but also ensure your VM processes are taking account of new attack vectors or innovative exploits.
4. Streamline Your Processes
Bottlenecks in your vulnerability management lifecycle can lose you precious time. If your toolset is poorly integrated or roles aren’t clearly defined, you may find it difficult to address critical issues and meet your vulnerability management SLAs.
To avoid this, your vulnerability management processes should be as streamlined as possible, empowering teams to address issues quickly and efficiently. A vulnerability management system can help to deliver this kind of optimised process by integrating every aspect of the vulnerability lifecycle, from collaboration to reporting and more.
5. Centralize Your Data
Vulnerability management can inundate you with data. You may find yourself emailing back and forth with vendors or hunting through PDF reports to find the results you need. Critical data may fail to reach the right team at the right time, resulting in delays that could leave systems exposed longer than necessary.
A central hub for your data from different security assessments will save you time, and frustration, and put critical information at your fingertips. It won’t just reduce the time spent searching for the data you need – it will also make it easier to identify recurring security issues and monitor your performance.
6. Prioritize Effectively
Most organizations will have far more active vulnerabilities than can be remediated in a given timeframe. Thankfully, many of these will not be practical targets for threat actors or will have only an extremely minor impact on your organization. However, others may put critical systems at immediate risk and need to be tackled without delay.
With this in mind, risk-based prioritization for your security issues is essential. This process should be clear, consistent, and tailored to your organization’s specific objectives and priorities. Not only is this crucial for keeping your organization safe, but it will also make the best use of your resources.
7. Implement Clear and Accessible Reporting
Measuring the impact of your vulnerability management efforts is essential. Tracking your performance across a range of key metrics helps ensure you’re meeting regulatory and compliance requirements, upholding your SLAs, and continuing to strengthen your security posture.
But simply measuring your monthly remediation rate or mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) isn’t enough – you need to ensure that key stakeholders have easy access to relevant data. Your reporting should be clear and digestible, ideally using user-friendly dashboards that can be accessed easily.
What Tools Can Help With Vulnerability Management?
A vulnerability management solution is software, a platform, or an application that makes it easy for IT security teams to implement vulnerability management program best practices. For example, a vulnerability management platform could aid in prioritizing, delegating, reporting, tracking, and collaborating on remediation.
The Rootshell Platform is our vendor-agnostic platform that helps you implement a modern vulnerability management program. Its powerful suite of features improves remediation from start to finish. It offers:
- Centralized security. Rootshell is vendor-agnostic, so you can use it to consolidate results from any vulnerability scanner or penetration testing vendor. Managing all your vulnerabilities in one place makes it seamless to continuously analyse, prioritize, and manage all issues across your estate.
- Intelligence-driven prioritization. Rootshell’s industry-leading Daily Exploit Detection alerts you to exploits for your issues on a daily basis, so you can gain the context needed to prioritize most effectively.
- Streamlined remediation. The Rootshell Platform modernizes vulnerability management programs and makes it easy for teams to deliver fast and effective remediation by reducing manual processes, integrating with ticketing systems, and much more.
- Real-time alerts. Rootshell ensures you have real-time insight into your threat landscape by providing you with live updates from tests and continuous cyber threat intelligence alerts tailored to your digital estate.
We have aligned the Rootshell Platform with the Gartner® Vulnerability Management Cycle to ensure that best practice processes guide your remediation programmes. To learn more, book a guided demo with one of our experts. Get in touch today for a guided demo with one of our experts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What data types are useful in a vulnerability management program?
Security assessments can inundate teams with data. Knowing which data to focus on and how to use it is key to vulnerability management best practices. As well as the number of vulnerabilities detected, affected assets, and severity ratings, consider gathering the following data insights:
- Monthly remediation rate (the number of remediated issues versus outstanding issues)
- The number of exploitable issues within your estate (corroborated by intelligence feeds)
- The percentage change in the number of issues per month, for each severity score
- The number of outstanding issues within your estate over time. This can be expressed as a graph to reveal any trends.
- The age of outstanding security issues, broken down by severity level.
- Mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR), broken down by severity level. This can also be expressed as a graph to show trends over time.
- The total number of: assets, assets with exploits, compliant assets, and non-compliant assets (‘compliant’ with regards to your SLA deadlines)
- The number of outstanding issues per system owner. This can be expressed as a leader board to assist with following up on remediation.
The Rootshell Platform generates all these metrics for you, presented in clear dashboards.
What is risk-based vulnerability management?
Risk-based vulnerability management is a strategy for prioritizing security issues in line with the risk they pose to an organization.
This strategy is particularly import for an enterprise vulnerability management program, where it is impossible for IT security teams to resolve every issue within a vast, global network.
What is the difference between vulnerability management and vulnerability assessment?
Vulnerability management is not to be confused with a vulnerability assessment. Vulnerability management encompasses the end-to-end process of managing security issues, from discovery to remediation. On the other hand, a vulnerability assessment is a type of IT security test that discovers security issues within an organization’s network.
What is the difference between a penetration test and a vulnerability assessment?
A penetration test simulates a real-world attack on your organization’s network, applications, systems, to identify any weaknesses. A pen test is conducted by skilled consultants, who use the same techniques as real-word hackers; you can think of it as ‘ethical hacking’. On the other hand, vulnerability scanning is carried out using automated tools and solely focuses on identifying vulnerabilities within software.
What is cyber threat intelligence?
Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) enables your organization to understand the potential threats and threat actors looking to perform malicious activities against your brand, employees, and customers. This intelligence can be gathered from a wide range of sources, including exploit databases, open source intelligence from the web, and more.
What are the differences between a vulnerability, a risk, and a threat?
Within threat vulnerability management (TVM), the terms ‘vulnerability’, ‘risk’, and ‘threat’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but they have different meanings.
- Vulnerability: the security weaknesses within an organization’s IT network, e.g. a system misconfiguration
- Threat: incidents that could lead to a breach of an organization, e.g. insufficient phishing training for staff
- Risk: an evaluation of the impact a threat could have, specific to the organization, e.g. a critical asset is at risk
