In the digital scenario with expanding threat landscape, businesses are facing complex IT environments with vulnerabilities. This is making difficult and challenging to manage effective vulnerability remediation. Among these, many businesses face scarcity of resources and the employees are already burdened, addressing the vulnerabilities becomes an extra responsibility.
In fact, this is a necessary step where you got to know which vulnerabilities are more severe, that may ensure desired outcome and make sure you address and mitigate them as quickly as possible. Just like all chess pieces do not pose the same significance, similarly, organizations should prioritize vulnerabilities based on severity, exploitability, and business impact. Lots of security metrics focus on that outcome, still the journey from prioritization to outcome stays opaque and poorly understood.
What is Vulnerability Prioritization?
Vulnerability Prioritization is a process of identification of vulnerabilities and prioritizing their remediation on the basis of potential impact, exploitability, and other contextual factors including asset information, severity, business-critical impact and threat intelligence.
The goal of vulnerability prioritization is to ensure that high-risk vulnerabilities are addressed first and then the lower-risk vulnerabilities are addressed subsequently, those within the ambit of an organization's specific goals and risk tolerance.
The concept of vulnerability prioritization is similar to that of understanding the pieces in a chess game, where the loss of each piece do not carry the same weight. Chasing every vulnerability with limited human resources will cause burden in daily tasks, hence, focus on those that need immediate remediation.
Benefits of Vulnerability Prioritization
Adoption of vulnerability management prioritization initiates a proactive cyber security approach. This grants continuous visibility into the assets of an organization, their associated exposures and the severity of vulnerabilities that may cause impact in businesses.
This way organizations can more effectively allocate their limited resources , focusing on that vulnerabilities that requires immediate attention. In addition with addressing potential security breaches in a timely manner, it also prevents skillful adversaries from exploiting them, and thereby safeguarding both financial assets and the reputation of organization.
Along with these, regulatory frameworks such as GDPR mandates a vulnerability prioritization program. Businesses need to adhere to these standards that bolster their credibility by aligning with esteemed certifications.
Opaque Security Journey
The CISOs along with their teams have clear metrics to analyze progress on handling vulnerabilities. This includes mean-time-to-detect, mean-time-to-respond, percentage of critical unpatched vulnerabilities, time to patch and many more.
Tracking these metrics shall initiate progress as teams are aware that there will be a matter of judgement. However, the metrics alone cannot reveal the complete side, not they can optimize the security efficiency of any team as:
- Metrics can be gamed
- Metrics don't reveal which problems were solved and how
In a scenario, a security team may modify the vulnerability policy to add exceptions but ignores that the vulnerability was never fixed even though the alert was muted. This can bring into sight, new vulnerabilities that match that policy to also get ignored and cause impact on the overall security.
Metrics provide a false sense of security if there are outliers who avoid the patch or it can be hard to reach devices that remains unpatched for extended periods. If metrics improve, without reviewing the process we cannot judge whether improvements came via brute force and effort, through better systems or better process design.
Factors to Consider Prioritizing Vulnerabilities
While you prioritize vulnerability remediation, you need to consider a multifaced approach to ensure they address the most critical risks first. Below, we have discussed the key factors to consider in prioritizing vulnerabilities:
Severity
This is determined using tools like the Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System (CVSS). CVSS provides a standardized way to analyze and rate the severity of vulnerabilities, giving a score between 0 to 10, with higher scores signifying higher severity.
The severity level depicts the potential impact of a vulnerability on a system or application if exploited.
Exploitability
This states how easily and likely a vulnerability can be exploited by potential attackers. Factors that affect exploitability include the availability of Proof of Concept (PoC) exploit code, the complexity needed to exploit the vulnerability, and there after the potential rewards that an attacker may get from the exploitation. Those vulnerabilities having known exploits available publicly shall be given higher priority.
Impact
This analyses the potential consequences when a vulnerability is exploited. Potential impacts may result in data breaches, system downtimes, reputational damage, financial losses and many more. Having an understanding of the consequences can help to prioritize which vulnerabilities demand immediate attention on the basis on their potential harm.
Asset Information/ Value
As we know, all the assets in an organization do not pose the same value. Assets may include databases with sensitive information, critical infrastructure or services that are important for business operations. Understanding the importance and value of each asset, businesses can determine the potential impact of a vulnerability and prioritize remediation efforts accordingly.
Threat Intelligence
Incorporation of real-world threat data can assist organizations to identify vulnerabilities, which are currently exploited in the wild or are part of trending attack patterns. Knowing about active exploits, recent attacks and threats from credible sources can provide insights into which vulnerabilities are most likely to be targeted next.
Additionally, the broader business context, regulatory compliance requirements and the organization's specific risk appetite shall be taken into consideration in the vulnerability prioritization process. This holistic approach ensures that the prioritization aligns with the goals of organization's business and risk management strategy.
How to prioritize Vulnerability Remediation?
Prioritization of vulnerabilities ensures that organizations address the most immediate security threats. Organizations can prioritize the vulnerability remediation in the following six steps:
Step 1: Asset Visibility
The basis of any vulnerability prioritization program is to have a comprehensive visibility over assets in the organizational network and environment, including dependencies and third-party software and hardware.
Step 2: Comprehensive Attack Vector Coverage
Once the identification of assets are done, it is important to understand the attack vectors that adversaries may exploit to gain an initial foothold in the organizational environment via vulnerable assets.
Step 3: Remediation Recommendations
After the potential attack vectors are identified, create actionable remediation steps to address these vulnerabilities.
Step 4: Business Context
It should be noted that vulnerabilities shall be assessed within the context of the business, such as the most critical assets of the business, vulnerabilities that could potentially disrupt or damage the functionality of the business.
Step 5: Remediation Implementation
Once the vulnerabilities have been prioritized on the basis of business context, organizations shall implement the remediation steps.
Step 6: Validation of the Patches and Continuous Monitoring
In the final step, even though the remediation steps are concluded, organizations are required to verify if the applied patches and security updates are genuinely defending against exploitation attacks for particular and identified vulnerabilities. Even if the patches are functioning at the specific time the validation is conducted, adversaries may work around these patches through reverse engineering tactics. Therefore, organizations need to implement corresponding rules that will trigger their SIEM product, signifying them about the malicious behavior of the adversaries.
Vulnerability Prioritization Tools
Below are some of the open-source vulnerability prioritization tools:
- VulnWhisperer: This tools is designed to retrieve vulnerability data from various sources into a centralized location for analysis and prioritization, thus, facilitating effective vulnerability management.
- OpenVAS (Greenbone Vulnerability Management): OpenVAS has developed into a full-fledged vulnerability scanner and vulnerability prioritization tool that provides detailed insights into significant threats in systems.
- Vuls: It is a go-based vulnerability scanner designed for continuous scanning. This tool prioritize vulnerabilities proactively, giving insights into potential threats.
- Magellan: This is an open-source tool that focuses on the storage aspect of vulnerabilities. Magellan can be used in tandem with other tools to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their potential impact.
- CVE Search: This is a web-based tool that allows organizations to pull updated vulnerability information directly from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and other sources, that can be useful for vulnerability prioritization.
Organizations can use these vulnerability prioritization tools, so that they can more effectively assess, rank, and address potential vulnerabilities in their digital infrastructure.
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