Organizations have considerably accelerated their business processes during the past ten years. Their usage of technology has expanded along with the size of the teams setting up new systems and the quantity of assets they have produced. The speed at which businesses have grown, however, has left their vulnerability management systems in the dust.
Companies must understand that vulnerability management requires more than just “getting your hands around it all.” There will always be more vulnerabilities in your system than you can manually repair since there are simply too many of them every day.
Organize Resources And Weaknesses Into A Single Inventory.
You must have a better grasp of your assets before your company can effectively manage vulnerabilities. In its suggested list of steps for cyber-defense, the Center for Internet Security cites “inventory and management of enterprise assets” as the very first key security control. This is because a company cannot effectively manage vulnerabilities until it has a thorough understanding of its assets.
Find The “Crown Gem” Or The Essential Resources For The Company.
The importance of each computer system in your surroundings varies. In comparison to your payroll system, a test system sitting beneath someone’s desk with no production data is a critical vulnerability that is much less important. Thus, if you don’t already have a list of your royal jewels, this is an excellent moment to start.
Your organization’s prized possessions are of great interest to your incident response team. They might if you don’t have the list. Additionally, if your efforts lead to fewer vulnerabilities on those crown jewel assets that can be exploited, this translates into fewer and events with lower impact on those business-critical assets.
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Threat Intelligence Should Be Added To Vulnerability Data.
An average of 2,800 new vulnerabilities were reported per month in 2022. That means you had to address 2,800 vulnerabilities per month merely to maintain your position and prevent the backlog from growing. You needed to address more issues if you wanted to advance.
Fixing just critical and high-severity vulnerabilities is the prevailing wisdom. Yet, 51% of vulnerabilities, according to Qualys, fit that description. To maintain your position, you must patch 1,428 vulnerabilities each month.
Scalable Automation Of Repetitive Vulnerability Management Tasks
Gathering KPIs or other metrics, assigning tickets and tracking evidence of false positives are all examples of repetitive, uninteresting work that a security analyst nevertheless spends 50 to 75% of their workday performing. Thankfully, these are tasks that algorithms can assist with or even completely automate.
Teams Should Receive Prioritized Vulnerability Fixes.
One of the trickiest information security techniques is vulnerability management. Every other security procedure has some degree of influence over its own outcomes. They do a certain action, and that action leads in a certain conclusion.
Vulnerability management, however, must first persuade another team to take a certain action. The action then results in a consequence, and the vulnerability management team member is assessed based on the outcomes of another person’s actions. At its worst, it amounts to giving a spreadsheet and the request to “fix this” to a system administrator. As a result, a few vulnerabilities are randomly corrected.