Overcoming the 5 Roadblocks of System Vulnerability Management

System vulnerability management is vital in maintaining the security posture of your organization. As your organization grows with new technology and innovation, a vulnerability management solution needs to evolve to protect you from a myriad of cyber-attacks.

If system vulnerabilities are left unidentified, it is obvious that your organization will be ransacked by cyber criminals. Hence, to ensure that your vulnerability management tool is not lagging, you need to improve and evaluate it from time to time.

Are you tripping on these roadblocks in achieving system vulnerability management? In this article, let us understand how to overcome these hurdles.

Vulnerability scans are usually long and performed periodically. Hence, the identifying vulnerabilities becomes off and on. If you are not monitoring vulnerabilities continuously, there comes the security gap where cybercriminals can easily exploit your devices.

ASK YOURSELF:

Is the vulnerability scanner capable of continuously identifying a broad range of vulnerabilities?

SOLUTION:

Continuous monitoring of system vulnerabilities gives you the ability to proactively fix them. . Consider scanning your computing environment in real-time on a daily basis with lower bandwidth. The cherry on top is if your vulnerability scanner leverages a comprehensive vulnerability database with numerous security checks for precise detection of vulnerabilities.

So, it closes the window of opportunity for cybercriminals to enter your network.

Vulnerability management scanners were designed to detect flaws with CVEs. But, if consider the definition of a vulnerability, it is something that exposes you to risk. Hence, misconfigurations, security control deviations, missing patches, posture anomalies, and other security risks are also vulnerabilities to be prioritized and remediated. These vulnerabilities can be potentially hacked by cyber-attackers as not all vulnerabilities have standard CVE numbers.

ASK YOURSELF:

Are we managing vulnerabilities beyond CVEs in our network?

SOLUTION:

All CVEs are vulnerabilities, but not vulnerabilities have CVEs. Any minor loophole will put you at risk. Hence, system vulnerability management must have extensive scanning ability to detect and remediate all vulnerabilities beyond CVEs.

When a vulnerability scanner detects huge vulnerabilities, the decision of what to fix and when to fix is a great challenge because prioritization is more than just severity ratings. Cyber-criminals will focus on high-critical flaws, remediating each flaw is not feasible, and your organization will be the next breach static. Despite severity ratings l, there are other risk factors to consider like active threats and more.

ASK YOURSELF:

Is my system vulnerability management program prioritizing vulnerabilities well considering numerous risk factors?

SOLUTION:

To strategically achieve system vulnerability management, you must invest in a security tool that evaluates risk levels by considering multiple factors like threat intelligence feed, asset inventory, current exploit activities, and public risk ratings of vulnerabilities.  t is when risk-based prioritization comes into the picture. The outcome of prioritization will help you focus on the critical flaws, and you can take smarter decisions to remediate them.

With rising cyber threats, legacy security tools must evolve to combat sophisticated cyberattacks. And it is impossible for humans to manually identify and mitigate vulnerabilities. And identifying vulnerability is on one side, and remediating is on the other. Most IT security admins lag in remediating vulnerabilities soon after identifying them. In the gap between identification and remediation, cybercriminals crawl into your network.

ASK YOURSELF:

Does my system vulnerability management allows instant remediation and reduce security gaps?

SOLUTION:

You must consider investing in modern vulnerability management tools that must identify and instantly remediate vulnerabilities. Modern security tools will proactively predict vulnerabilities and remediate them to keep up with evolving cyber-attacks.

Also, analyzing the output of the vulnerability scanner is difficult in a vulnerability management program. These hard and bulky reports are riddled with false positives making your team overwhelmed with clutter of vulnerability data.

ASK YOURSELF:

Can my vulnerability management program build easy and comprehensible reports without near-zero false positives?

SOLUTION:

Also, consider investing in vulnerability management tools that give comprehensible dashboards and trending reports. The reports and dashboards will help you fix vulnerabilities in a timely manner.

Cyber threat surface keeps evolving.  Ensuring that you are not stumbling upon the above roadblocks strengthens your security posture. To strengthen and maintain your security posture click here to assess your vulnerability management program!