What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management definition

Vulnerability management is the continuous process of identifying and remediating the potential security vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure and applications. Security vulnerabilities are any flaw or potential issue within the system or software that threat actors could use to perform data breaches and other cyberattacks.

Vulnerability examples include software and system misconfigurations, unpatched systems or applications, and weak authentication and authorization controls.

Potential attack vectors that should be assessed for weaknesses include:

• Your computer systems and devices, including the hardware and networking infrastructure.
• Your public-cloud-hosted assets, such as virtual machines, containers, and other infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
• The software you run, including operating systems, server processes, productivity software, and developer tools.
• The platforms you use, including SaaS platforms and web-based tools.
• The software you develop, including its dependencies (for example NPM packages and software packages from public repositories).

Why is vulnerability management important?

Vulnerability management is vital for the security and business continuity of organizations that operate online or handle sensitive information (especially legally protected customer data).

As organizations’ IT infrastructure grows more complex and distributed, the importance of performing regular vulnerability management increases. Vulnerability management tools help security teams keep up with the frankly insane amount of software vulnerabilities that exist. Identifying and remediating the most critical vulnerabilities is integral and can’t be ignored. An effective vulnerability management program prioritizes the vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited so security teams can focus on a manageable subset of these vulnerabilities.

By managing the vulnerabilities that tools, software, and platforms you use expose, you reduce the risk of a successful hack or data breach exposing your organization to reputational, legal, or other financial damage.

Benefits of vulnerability management

Conducting regular or continuous vulnerability management ensures organizations limit the attack surface threats actors can use. Less security holes in a system or software makes it easier to discover and mitigate threats before they become a successful data breach or cyberattack.

Other vulnerability management benefits include:

• Staying compliant with regulatory requirements: HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS, just to start, all require organizations to regularly perform vulnerability management or face potential fines and reputational damage.
• Reducing costs associated with incidents: Performing regular vulnerability management lowers the chances of a successful cyberattack, such as ransomware. A ransomware attack can cost companies hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars if they decide to pay out or reputational damage if their data gets leaked and customers learn about the attack.
• Improves efficiency of security operations: With a vulnerability management program in place, security teams understand who handles what vulnerabilities and can track what ones have been remediated and ones that still need to be addressed. Less time is wasted.
• More proactive response instead of reactive: With a program in place for regularly discovering, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities, security teams can move faster in responding to new critical vulnerabilities and emerging threats aren’t missed.

Vulnerability management process

Before you establish a vulnerability management process, you should build a plan that addresses the unique cybersecurity landscape of your infrastructure. This involves determining what software and systems the vulnerability management process will cover, the roles and responsibilities of those involved in the software development and delivery lifecycle, deciding on security policies and practices, and finally choosing tools that meet these requirements.

There are five generally recognized vulnerability management steps that organizations should implement in their security policies and practices:

1. Assessment and identification: Regularly scan your systems and software for potential vulnerabilities.
2. Evaluation and prioritization: Assess the potential impact of each vulnerability, as well as the measures that will need to be taken to address it, and prioritize the remediation of each identified vulnerability.
3. Remediation and mitigation: Some vulnerabilities can be completely remediated with a software patch or configuration change. Others cannot be completely fixed directly, and must instead be mitigated using external tools, for example by adding a firewall rule to block access to a vulnerable application.
4. Reporting and ownership: Document each vulnerability and the measures taken to address it. Ownership is important here as responsibility for each vulnerability should be specifically assigned to ensure that nothing falls through the gaps.‍
5. Monitoring and re-assessment: New vulnerabilities are discovered regularly, so you must perform ongoing monitoring of your IT assets and regularly re-assess vulnerabilities, and check that mitigation measures are still in place.

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How are vulnerabilities ranked and categorized?

The industry-standard format for ranking and categorizing software vulnerabilities is the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVSS is used by cybersecurity organizations and vendors to catalog and communicate the details of a security vulnerability, including how the vulnerability can be exploited and its complexity, as well as the potential impact of a successful exploit. This is then converted into a severity score from 0-10.

The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) uses the CVSS format in its database of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). The CVE program uniquely identifies known vulnerabilities in a centralized, searchable database so that individuals and organizations can make sure their devices and software are fully patched (or that mitigations are in place) against known attack vectors. Checking for CVEs for the software and systems you use should be part of your vulnerability management process.

Vulnerability management vs. vulnerability assessment

Vulnerability assessment is not the same thing as vulnerability management. Vulnerability assessment is the first step in the vulnerability management process, but can be performed as a standalone, once-off task for a project, application, or system. Meanwhile, vulnerability management is an ongoing process for discovering and remediating vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability assessments scan IT infrastructure, applications, and systems for potential issues that could weaken their security posture. Assessments are a useful part of vulnerability management because they provide visibility into vulnerabilities and their risks. They are often done through vulnerability scanners, which include application scanners, network-based scans, host-based scans, and database scans.

How to manage vulnerabilities in the software development lifecycle

Your vulnerability management process should be integrated into your own secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC). Vulnerabilities can be introduced at any point in the development lifecycle, from coding and development all the way to application runtime. Effective vulnerability management programs should offer coverage and scanning across this entire lifecycle to ensure critical vulnerabilities are caught before they enter production.

Supply chain security is critical in modern software development because documented supply chain attacks (including the SolarWinds incident that resulted in tens of thousands of businesses being exposed to vulnerabilities) are a risk for all businesses that rely on third-party software and libraries, as well as the customers that they serve.

CI/CD security that monitors your code and testing/deployment pipelines for potential issues should be followed by scanning at runtime to identify vulnerabilities in production environments. Your cloud security management should also extend to your container orchestration platform like Kubernetes as they are powerful tools for automation and scalability, but present their own unique vulnerabilities that must be assessed and monitored.

When a security vulnerability is identified, the relevant party should be immediately notified so that they can take ownership and ensure that it is addressed. Advanced solutions can break container images down to the composing layer, identifying whether vulnerabilities belong to the base image or the application layer. This makes it easy to determine which team is responsible for the vulnerability so they can remediate quickly.

Providing full coverage for your SSDLC in a cloud environment requires a cloud-first approach that unifies each tool. Traditional cybersecurity tools that handle each task individually do not provide complete visibility or coverage in cloud-native environments, and do not integrate directly with cloud platforms to monitor for misconfigurations on the platform itself that may introduce a vulnerability.

Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP) provide full coverage of cloud assets. By monitoring the cloud environment itself for misconfigurations and suspicious behavior, scanning your software dependencies for known attack vectors, and actively monitoring your running applications for suspicious behavior, CNAPPs provide a comprehensive cloud security solution, which includes vulnerability management.

When choosing a CNAPP, you should compare the features that allow for collaboration across your teams through a unified web interface, and make sure that it includes active detection and response automation so that security incidents are dealt with immediately. Once an attack vector is closed off, an investigation and re-assessment of the remediation and mitigation measures can take place.

Software vulnerability management with Sysdig

Sysdig provides comprehensive vulnerability management as part of its CNAPP platform. It scans your runtime, CI/CD pipeline, and container registries for software vulnerabilities, assisting with identifying known exploits and vulnerabilities.

This includes:

• Runtime insights to help you prioritize security vulnerabilities in active packages which present the greatest risk of exploitation, reducing alert noise.
• Layered analysis to clearly distinguish between base image and application layer vulnerabilities, making sure the right people are notified and vulnerabilities are remediated quickly.
• Automated scanning and vulnerability management across your SDLC — without your images leaving your environment — and extensive coverage of workloads, wherever they run.

To find out how Sysdig vulnerability management benefits your business, read our guide on how to do vulnerability management the right way.

4 Critical Business Values Delivered by Sysdig Vulnerability Management                                      

Security leaders are continuously seeking the most productive and efficient ways to minimize vulnerabilities and reduce risk. See how customers have met their goals with these business values delivered by Sysdig.        

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