Vulnerability Management: The Process & Context of Today

The shift to working from home, and now the shift back to hybrid or in person work, has changed the IT environment of many organizations. With every shift in technology, every application update, and every new employee, new vulnerabilities can be introduced. When new vulnerabilities are introduced, the attack surface is increased, and hackers have more opportunities to exploit your system. To reduce attack surface and be better prepared against attacks, implementing an advanced vulnerability management process is business critical. The vulnerability management process is the process of continuously scanning your organization’s environment for vulnerabilities, remediating them, then rescanning. Continuously going through the vulnerability management cycle is required because new vulnerabilities can appear every day. The goal of this process is to minimize the number of vulnerabilities in your environment and therefore minimize the chance of cybersecurity attacks. A typical vulnerability management process consists of several steps: • The first is the discovery of security vulnerabilities in information systems • Next, the team will review the vulnerabilities that had been discovered for false positives or other errors to see which of these vulnerabilities detected is most applicable. • Ranking the vulnerabilities high, medium, or low. The higher risk vulnerabilities will take priority during the remediation step. • Next, the team will communicate each vulnerability to the owner of each system • Next, the team will remediate the vulnerabilities • Finally, validate the effectiveness of the remediation Penetration Testing vs Vulnerability Management Vulnerability management is often run hand in hand with other vulnerability detecting tools such as penetration testing. The main differentiation between the two is that penetration aims to remediate vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited by a hacker, while vulnerability scanning simply looks for vulnerabilities that exist. Many security-conscious organizations like to implement both tools to better ensure that vulnerabilities are being detected and remediated quickly. Having a combination of assessments and solutions in your environment helps to reduce the attack surface in your environment, and better protect your organization from a cybersecurity attack. Vulnerabilities In the Cloud As more organizations are moving data into the cloud, more traditional vulnerability scanning may become less effective. When evaluating your current security processes, ensure that they are being extended to the data in both the cloud and on premise. To learn more about the future of vulnerability management visit https://aurorait.com/vulnerability-management-process/ to read Aurora’s whitepaper: Vulnerability Management in a Post-Pandemic World or simply contact sales@aurorait.com to learn more about improving your security posture.