What is the Vulnerability Management Process?

Vulnerability management is the process of identifying, assessing and monitoring the threats to the security of a system, network, or data. The vulnerability management process involves identifying vulnerabilities, assessing the threats, and then implementing policies to protect against these threats.

As Rootshell Security explains (https://www.rootshellsecurity.net/vulnerability-management-program/), a vulnerability is a weakness or exposure in your systems, network, or data that can be exploited by an attacker. A threat is an action an attacker can take to exploit a vulnerability.

Your company’s vulnerability management process should be in place to identify and secure against vulnerabilities.

So, if you’re not sure what vulnerability management is or how to implement it, here’s an explanation of the process, along with some of the key elements of vulnerability management.

The Vulnerability Management Process

This process can be divided into four steps which include:

a) Identifying Vulnerabilities

b) Evaluating Vulnerabilities

c) Treating Vulnerabilities

d) Reporting Vulnerabilities

a) Identifying Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability scanner is the centre of a basic vulnerability management solution. The scan has four stages:

• Scan network-accessible systems through sending or pinging them UDP/TCP packets.
• Know the open ports and the services operating on scanned systems.
• If doable, log in remotely to systems to collect detailed system information.
• Correlate system data with known vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability scanners can identify various systems operating on a network, like desktops, laptops, physical and virtual services, firewalls, databases, printers and switches. Recognised systems are surveyed for different attributes: open ports, operating system, user accounts, installed software, system configurations, file system structure and more.

This data is then utilised to associate identified vulnerabilities to a scanned system. To perform the operation, vulnerability scanners will utilise vulnerability data that has a number of publicly identified vulnerabilities.

Correctly organising vulnerability scans are a vital element of a vulnerability managing solution. Sometimes, vulnerability scanners may disrupt the network and even the systems they are scanning.

If the available network bandwidth and becomes more limited on-peak hours, the organisation require vulnerability scans to be scheduled to operate during off-hours.

Suppose some systems behave erratically or become unstable on a network. In that case, it’s good to exclude them from vulnerabilities scans, or you may need to fine-tune the scan to reduce the disruptiveness.

Adaptive scanning is the current method of additional streamlining and automating vulnerability scans depending on network changes.

Apart from vulnerability scanners, there are other ways to collect system vulnerability information. Endpoint agents enable vulnerability managing solutions to continuously collect vulnerability information from a system without doing network scans. These assist organisations to uphold up-to-date system vulnerability information.

In the evolving landscape of cybersecurity, managing vulnerabilities is not limited to on-premises systems. As organizations increasingly move services and data to the cloud, it’s essential to ensure these environments are secure from potential threats. Incorporating cloud penetration testing into your Vulnerability Management Process is a proactive approach to detect and rectify any weaknesses in cloud infrastructure before they’re exploited.

b) Evaluating Vulnerabilities

After identifying the vulnerabilities, they require to be evaluated to deal with the risks they pose properly and according to the risk management strategy of an organisation.

Vulnerability management solutions offer different vulnerabilities and risk rating scores like CVSS(Common Vulnerability Scoring System). These scores help the organisation by identifying the vulnerabilities they should give priority. However, the actual risk posed by a vulnerability is based on other factors apart from scores and risk rating.

These factors may include:

• How challenging is it in exploiting this vulnerability?
• Is the vulnerability a false or true positive?

c) Treating Vulnerabilities

Once the vulnerabilities have been validated, the next phase is to prioritise treating the vulnerabilities using the initial stakeholders to the network or business. There is a variety of methods to treat vulnerabilities, such as:

• Remediation: Fully fixing a vulnerability to avoid its exploitation.
• Mitigation: Lessening the impact or the likelihood of the vulnerabilities being exploited.
• Acceptance: Taking no action in fixing or otherwise lessening the impact or likelihood of the vulnerabilities being exploited.

d) Reporting Vulnerabilities

Conducting vulnerability assessments regularly and continuously helps an organisation know the efficiency and speed of their vulnerability managing program over time. Vulnerability management solutions normally have various choices for exporting and visualising the vulnerability scan information using customisable dashboards and reports.

This enables IT teams to easily know which remediation tactics will assist them to fix the vulnerabilities with fewer efforts, assists the security team to keep track of the trends of vulnerability over time in various parts of the network and as well assists in supporting compliance and controlling requirements of an organisation.

Attackers and threats are constantly changing the same way organisations are adding new cloud services, mobile devices, applications and networks to their environments.

Every change introduces a new risk whereby a fresh hole has to be left open in your network, giving attackers a chance to slip in. The same applies when you have a new partner, affiliate, employee or client; you introduce your organisation to fresh opportunities and at the same time expose it to threats.

Protecting your business from these threats needs a vulnerability managing solution that monitors and adapts to all changes. Without the threats, you will always remain one step ahead.