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Vulnerability management: Your ultimate guide to cyber security assessment and remediation

Vulnerability management is an evolving field that grows in complexity as it accelerates at pace with the increase of threats. Not only does vulnerability management make known how severe cyberattacks have become, but it also shines a light on how prepared ( or unprepared ) many organizations truly are for the event of a cyber attack.

Gal Gonen | December 19, 2023

In 2019, Ponemon surveyed organizations that had fallen prey to major security breaches. 60% of these breaches involved known risks with available patches that simply hadn’t been applied. Around 80% of cyberattacks in 2020 were from exploits that were at least three years old. The urgent need to utilize the best modernized tools and methods is at an all-time high, with the cost of a data breach in 2022 a record $4.35 million per incident. With the stakes this high, it’s important that organizations learn and implement the best approaches to vulnerability management. In this article, we’ll address the best procedures for identifying and handling cyber threats.

Agenda

  1. What is vulnerability management?
  2. A brief history of the vulnerability management landscape
  3. Who is responsible for vulnerability management?
  4. Why is vulnerability management important?
  5. What is a vulnerability?
  6. What are the different types of vulnerability?
  7. How to address threats with vulnerability management
  8. Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM)
  9. What steps are taken in vulnerability management?
  10. How are vulnerabilities ranked and categorized?
  11. What is the difference between vulnerability management and a vulnerability assessment?
  12. How to protect against vulnerabilities
  13. FAQs

What is vulnerability management ?

Vulnerability management is the multi-stage process of handling cyber risk for an organization. Today’s vulnerability management process involves identifying security weaknesses in infrastructure, cloud-based systems, and applications. As we head into 2024, this process is essential in the face of mounting cyber risk for organizations:

vulnerabilities 2023

Over the years, vulnerability management has gone from a predominantly manual process to more sophisticated, automated procedures. It requires specialized tools to identify and prioritize risks so that proper strategies can be designed and implemented, with the ultimate goal of preventing an IT system security breach.

Vulnerability management follows a procedural system of identifying threats—a framework to prioritize and treat threats, laying a foundation for long-term management specific to every organization’s operations and needs.

A brief history of the vulnerability management landscape

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the first vulnerability scanners were released. Relatively speaking, there weren’t a lot of vulnerabilities in those days compared to today. For example, in the year 2000, there were 1,020 disclosed vulnerabilities. In comparison, 2018 saw a staggering 16,555 disclosed vulnerabilities.

The scanning and remediation process in those days was very much a manual process. The scanning software would provide a report of vulnerabilities found, which had to be analyzed for accuracy and validity by someone in the IT department. The report would be sent to IT department heads for review and approval. Then once approved, the System Administrators would remediate vulnerabilities and follow-up with another vulnerability scan to verify the results.

Averaging only about 85 vulnerabilities per month, this manual process was manageable, and there wasn’t a real need to automate vulnerability management. As the number of vulnerabilities increased in subsequent years, and the importance of vulnerability management became more evident to organizations, manual scanning and remediation plans would soon become impracticable.

Fast forward by a decade, and the number of vulnerabilities steadily increased with 4,652 reported in 2010 and 6,447 new vulnerabilities in 2016. However, starting in 2017, an explosion of vulnerabilities began that has continued into 2019.

There’s no doubt that the seemingly never-ending barrage of new vulnerabilities cannot be managed with a manual vulnerability management plan. Manually reviewing and prioritizing known vulnerabilities is unrealistic and just too time-consuming.

Whether your remediation processes resemble the ‘early days’ method or you have implemented more modern tools and processes, it’s crucial that you take a look at your vulnerability process and ask: am I taking the necessary steps to make my environment as secure as possible to meet the modern threat landscape?