Traditional vulnerability management strategies are wholly out of step with contemporary realities. Approaches centred on scanning and patching are too slow, too laborious, and too costly. They fail to catch many actual threats while squandering valuable resources on false alarms. As a result, security professionals are fighting a losing battle against a growing array of threats and adversaries.
There’s a prescriptive blueprint for doing this. It’s called vulnerability lifecycle management, and it has four key parts:
1. Holistic discovery: Vulnerability data from all assets (including IT, OT, and cloud) and every corner of the network is aggregated. This requires scan less detection in addition to active scanning. The result is a 360-degree view of the attack surface.
2. Precise prioritization: Vulnerability data is incorporated into a network model. This data is then analyzed to reveal exposures. Exposures, severity, exploitability, and asset importance are analyzed together to compute an exact risk score that allows rigorous prioritization.
3. Targeted mitigation and remediation: Automated tools identify and recommend effective, practical measures to address and reduce risks. These measures go well beyond patching and include configuration changes, network segmentation, and more. This enables organizations to prevent or limit attacks (including zero-day attacks) even when patches are impractical or unavailable.
4. Ongoing oversight: Automated tools assist security personnel in implementing and maintaining remediation. The tools automatically generate tickets, track performance versus SLAs (Service Level Agreements), keep teams apprised of changes requiring updates, and ensure that issues are promptly addressed.
The lifecycle approach transforms vulnerability management from a sporadic, patchwork process to a continuous and comprehensive one. Most importantly, it enables organizations to move from reaction to prevention, no longer stuck responding to threats after the fact but prepared for whatever may come.