Organizations can benefit from insight into these trends as they navigate the paths of creating a vulnerability management program and select a partner to go on the journey with them.
Chaos, silos, and reactionary confusion are three constant and highly visible characteristics that constrain the state of vulnerability management today. The ability of organizations to manage and prioritize security effectively, has been severely compromised by a tsunami of vulnerabilities and rapidly growing attack surfaces.
The difficulties encountered when attempting to implement a useful vulnerability management program examines trends that will favorably influence vulnerability management going forward. Organizations can benefit from insight into these trends as they navigate the waters of creating a vulnerability management program and select a partner for the journey.
Organizations now place a higher value than ever on their storage and backup assets in this era of pervasive ransomware. A sure-fire way to stop organizations from taking storage for granted is to lock them out of resources they have always had on demand access to. Similarly, discovering backups that have been encrypted or corrupted by cybercriminals and being unable to recover them, alters security teams’ perspectives on the value of backups. These factors are being considered more by security tools. The following are some of the top vulnerability management trends that will prevail in 2023:
Increased Number of Vulnerabilities
Storage and backup services have become a top target for bad actors in recent years. Attacks on organizations could become significantly more effective and challenging to thwart by manipulating storage and backup. Victims would be unable to recover locked or corrupted production data after backup copies were deleted, forcing them to pay a ransom or risk losing the data forever. When storage and backup systems are breached, adversaries have direct access to the most secure data assets within an organization, allowing them to exfiltrate vast quantities of sensitive data and contaminating recovery copies to run the risk of external control even after an organization has recovered from an attack.
Also Read: Strategies to Strengthen Data Security
Prioritizing vulnerabilities is now considered standard practice
As customers assess vulnerability management solutions, risk-based vulnerability management will become a prerequisite feature. Risk-based prioritization and vulnerability management require automation and machine learning. Black box machine learning prioritization models, on the other hand, should be avoided by businesses because they are unable to shed light on the “why” and “how” of prioritization. Understanding why and how is just as crucial as knowing what to prioritize. The vulnerabilities that cybercriminals are most likely to exploit in malware or targeted attacks can be identified using the most recent threat intelligence and machine learning algorithms. However, in order to use the data to create future business plans, leadership needs to understand the “why” and “how.”
Gaping Holes
The majority of vulnerability management solutions currently available, only offer bare-bones backup and storage protection.
For instance, a sizable portion of the storage and backup estate depends on specialized appliances that run proprietary and restricted operating systems, which are not supported by vulnerability management solutions. Additionally, dedicated networking is crucial for storage and backup. A sizable portion of this dedicated networking is not based on IP and Ethernet networking but rather on dedicated Fibre-Channel hardware and protocols, which are hidden from vulnerability management tools. In order to avoid covering underdeveloped organizations, insurers have significantly raised the bar for storage and backup security.
Emerging dedicated storage and backup security tools cover all assets, including storage and backup software, management consoles, dedicated appliances, IP and non-IP network components, and end-to-end virtual machines. Additionally, they can provide a framework for automating remediation, compliance validation with popular security frameworks, and proactively check on storage and backup vendor security best practices.
Criticality and asset management are becoming essential requirements
Knowing what, where, and how crucial the organization’s most valuable assets are—asset management and criticality—are too frequently ignored. IT teams cannot accurately assess risk without being aware of these crucial elements of threatened assets. A risk-based vulnerability management program needs to consider assets’ criticality to be applicable to the company.
Contextual environmental controls are rather a fundamental vendor differentiator
Leaders acknowledge that contextual environmental controls are no longer best practices but a fundamental vendor differentiator. Threat-centric prioritization is only marginally superior to CVSS-based prioritization because every customer’s environment is different. Customers might perform more remediation than is necessary when a vendor overlooks contextual risks and environmental controls. Avoiding ineffective patching and producing useless work for IT teams is crucial.
Vulnerability management behavior modification involves changing one’s actions
Individual health objectives include gaining more energy, gaining muscle, reducing body fat, and sleeping better because everybody reacts differently to dietary intake, stress, and exercise. Similar to this, each organization’s vulnerability management program has a different set of business objectives, such as reducing remediation workload, lowering risk, reducing data noise, enhancing automation, and gaining real-time insights. Individualized programs that evaluate past performance and peer groups will be used as a motivating tool to alter enterprise vulnerability management practices.
Also Read: Key Strategies for Enterprise Cybersecurity in 2023
Configuration management and vulnerability management will combine into one category
Customers in the future should look for solutions that are stack-agnostic, flexible in analyzing both vulnerabilities and misconfiguration, and prioritize appropriately based on risk and business impact because configuration management is merely a subset of vulnerability management—or at least a close cousin.
Companies can get ready for the switch to a contemporary vulnerability management program by:
Knowing their assets: Customers can leverage cloud scale more quickly and with greater agility with cloud adoption, and assets can be easily turned on and off. The biggest blind spots in vulnerability management in the future maybe not knowing where the assets are or how crucial they are.
Not overlooking VM hygiene: Celebrity openness is important, but good VM hygiene should not be overlooked. It’s crucial to have a response to the risk that the celebrity vulnerabilities will be exposed, but businesses shouldn’t become overconfident once they have been cleared for them because the next Log4j, Heartbleed, or other new celebrity could appear at any time. Continuous insights into risks, threats, and countermeasure defense are the main goals of good VM hygiene.
Reasoning instead of counting the numbers: Customers are accustomed to keeping track of and reporting to the leadership team and board the number of critical, high, medium, and low vulnerabilities among the teams. The number count in a snapshot is irrelevant and not helpful. Enterprises can better describe the success of their risk management and remediation efforts by using trending data.
Utilizing the advantages implied by these upcoming trends will help organizations make the transition to a modern vulnerability program. An important best practice for vulnerability management is to adopt a risk-based strategy. Prioritize the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to the organization. This approach simplifies the remediation process, especially in cases where resources are limited and personnel is scarce or overworked, by removing the emphasis on eliminating every vulnerability in the environment.
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