Organizations today need to have effective vulnerability management in place to reduce the cyber threats to their business.
Cybercriminals today use sophisticated vectors to exploit the potential flaws in the organization’s IT network and infiltrate it. Hence, it is essential for businesses to execute vulnerability assessments as a part of security hygiene to review threats and risks to mitigate them.
Vulnerability assessments help businesses to spot all the attack surface areas in the IT infrastructure and remediate them before the cybercriminals can exploit them. Furthermore, implementing automated scanning tools to identify and notify the potential vulnerabilities, and also getting valuable insights into current business assets and related risks, is required to manage threats. Here are a few ways to manage vulnerabilities and remediate them effectively:
Spot vulnerabilities
It is crucial for organizations to understand all the possible vulnerabilities that might be a threat to the IT infrastructure. Once the organization spots all the vulnerabilities, it can understand which ones exist in the network. Threat intelligence and vulnerability database will help to streamline the search. Vulnerability scanners detect the impacted components and make an inventory to utilize in patch management. System mapping will help organizations to specify the location of the asset and ways they can access it, and other protected assets. This mapping will serve as a guide for vulnerability analysis and seamless remediation.
Also Read: Are Enterprises Ready for Modern Cyber Threats?
Analyze vulnerability
Once the SecOps teams detect all the potential vulnerabilities in the network, they can analyze the severity of the risks. Analyzing the vulnerability is an effective way for security teams to prioritize the tasks as per severity, and minimize risks quickly. CISOs should consider mitigating the high severity vulnerabilities first, to reduce the impact of the attack, while protecting the other IT infrastructure.
A common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) is a standard system that helps organizations to analyze the level of vulnerability based on inbuilt characteristics, temporary traits, and the particular impact of the vulnerability on the systems. One crucial aspect to consider while evaluating the vulnerability with CVSS is that once the CVSS assigns a severity level, it cannot be changed; hence threat intelligence and other business data should be considered for prioritization.
Evaluate controls
Organizations can have preventative or detective controls implemented to protect the IT infrastructure from various types of attacks. CISOs should consider evaluating the controls implemented to reduce or mitigate the potential threat or vulnerability. If the controls are not efficient enough to remediate the potential risks, they should be replaced with a more robust solution.
Remediate and report vulnerabilities
Remediating vulnerability will assist in tracking and minimizing access to attack surface areas. It is a perfect way to avoid complete exploitation of vulnerabilities till the SecOps teams patch the other attack surface areas. Once the SecOps teams identify the threats, they need to remediate them. Furthermore, Penetration testing is an efficient way to analyze the effectiveness of the security solution and ensure that new vulnerabilities do not arise due to remediation efforts.
Reporting vulnerabilities will assist the Security teams in enhancing the future response to the threats. Furthermore, it is an effective way to create a baseline for future remediation efforts, which will enhance the organization’s threat detection and response efforts.
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