What is vulnerability management?
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Vulnerability management is the process of identifying and remediating vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure and applications to protect against cyberattacks, breaches, and data leaks. It covers the identification and cataloging of potential vulnerabilities, and the measures you take to mitigate or resolve them.
This guide explains vulnerability management in detail, including the processes involved and how you can keep your systems and networks secure.
Vulnerability management is the process of identifying and addressing the potential security vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure. 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).
Vulnerability management is vital for the security and continuity of organizations that operate online or handle sensitive information (especially legally protected customer data). By managing the vulnerabilities that the 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.
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 steps for effective vulnerability management that you should implement in your security policies and practices:
- Assessment and identification: Regularly scan your systems and software for potential vulnerabilities.
- 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.
- 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.
- Reporting and ownership: Document each vulnerability and the measures taken to address it. Ownership is important here: Responsibility for each vulnerability should be specifically assigned to ensure that nothing falls through the gaps.
- 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.
Securing the Cloud: A Guide to Effective Vulnerability Management
Evolving vulnerability management for cloud‑native architectures is a critical step toward ensuring the security and reliability of cloud‑based systems
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 products 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.
How to manage vulnerabilities in your software development lifecycle
Your vulnerability management process should be integrated into your own software development lifecycle (SDLC). Vulnerabilities can be introduced at any point in the SDLC, from coding and development all the way to when the application is running. 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 — documented supply chain attacks (including the notorious 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 — platforms such as Kubernetes 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 SDLC 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, a CNAPP provides a comprehensive cloud security solution, including 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, take a look at our 4 Critical Business Values Delivered by Sysdig Vulnerability Management.
When deciding on the processes and practices you will enact in your own vulnerability management strategy, use our Securing the Cloud: A Guide to Effective Vulnerability Management Guide as a starting point, so that you can start with a foundation.
FAQs
Vulnerability management is the process of assessing, reviewing, and mitigating vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure and applications. The goal of vulnerability management is to reduce the overall risk of a successful cyberattack.
Vulnerability management is essential for organizations of any size that rely on online infrastructure, as it allows them to preemptively identify potential vectors for a cyberattack before they can be exploited and used to steal data or otherwise cause harm.
The vulnerability management process usually includes steps to identify, evaluate and prioritize, remediate, report, and then continually monitor cybersecurity threats that cannot be fully resolved.
Common vulnerability management tools include Sysdig Secure and OpenVAS. Additionally, many development tools will include their own tools for vulnerability scanning, for example NPM can run security audits on your project’s dependencies.
Alongside runtime security and incident response, vulnerability management is a key component of any comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that fully addresses the challenges posed by cloud security, and the legal responsibility organizations have to protect their customer data.
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.