Vulnerability remediation is an important part of any vulnerability management programme. It makes it possible for your organization to identify and fix vulnerable systems. It also prevents your systems from being hijacked or used for malicious purposes.
The process involves finding and identifying weaknesses in systems, networks, and applications, analyzing and prioritizing these weaknesses, and fixing them to protect business processes, data, and information.
For some organizations such as financial institutions handling credit card payments, vulnerability remediation is a required standard for compliance. As with all company objectives, however, vulnerability remediation does come with a set of challenges.
Challenges of Vulnerability Remediation
- The Number of Vulnerabilities Keeps Rising
Businesses and organizations continue to innovate around digital solutions for business processes and this continues to create an environment rife with vulnerabilities that further expose enterprises to malicious breaches.
The digital platform is here to stay which means cyber-attacks and malicious infiltration is the new norm. Millions of potential threats are detected every day by security teams and potential risks are gaining faster than companies can remedy them.
- How to Determine the Risk Potential of Vulnerabilities
In the past companies fixed this problem by patching and fixing every detected vulnerability but security metrics did not indicate improvement in risk management. In some cases, overall security was shown to have increased exposure to threats.
This approach also involved colossal investment in time and manpower making system security a financial nightmare for companies.
Vulnerability remediation has since improved by shifting its approach to Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM).
A risk-based approach involves analyzing which system vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk or rather which vulnerabilities are most prone to exploitation and malicious hacking.
Vulnerability assessment reveals myriad system weaknesses but about 80% of these are false positives and pose no real danger to the enterprise. Of the remaining 20%, 18% are low-risk vulnerabilities which leaves 2% as high-risk vulnerabilities that must be patched and monitored presently.
- Determining the Performance of the Remediation Process
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management encompasses a plethora of vulnerability management solutions each tailored to different systems and finding the optimal solution is a crucial investment.
A suitable vulnerability management system should report an increased overall metric score in the following areas:
- Coverage: measures by volume the number of risks fixed.
- Efficiency: measures the efficacy of remediation of actual high-risk vulnerabilities.
- Capacity: measures the number of risks that can be mitigated within a set time frame.
- Velocity: measures the pace of the remediation process.
- Overall: a performance metric based on all the aforementioned areas.
The 4 Steps of Vulnerability Remediation
Vulnerability remediation is a business-critical function and regardless of the RBVM solution, the remediation process is executed in four procedures.
- Find or discover
Finding vulnerabilities involves scanning and testing to determine how many vulnerabilities are plaguing the system and where they are located.
A common point of vulnerability occurs in coding authentication protocols where systems offer a single-step verification process as opposed to the recommended multiple-step verification process.
This exposes client information to successful electronic eavesdropping and the dangers of malicious hacking are thereof imminent.
Advanced vulnerability management systems employ cyclic scanning modes that continually scan and test for vulnerabilities throughout the software development cycle.
- Prioritize
Prioritizing vulnerabilities involves a complex scoring matrix that determines which vulnerabilities are the highest risk exposure points and raises those for remediation first.
This allows the security apparatus to mitigate against actual threats and harness finite resources to plug vulnerabilities that could actually compromise data and business processes.
- Remediate
The next step is to fix the vulnerabilities identified. Most if not all enterprises employ a combination of three strategies based on the threat potential, and the organization’s risk tolerance among other factors.
- Automated patches such as automatic upgrades are the most common approach.
- Patch Management Tools which manage patches and related assets to keep them relevant.
- Manual Updates
In certain cases disabling systems and disrupting services to preempt or mitigate imminent or ongoing threats can be the only viable option.
- Monitor
Monitoring involves a continuous evaluation of fixed vulnerabilities to ensure they do not recur.
Remediation measures may also introduce new vulnerabilities and these need to be raised in a timely manner to mitigate risks.
Monitoring overlaps with step one in a looped model where monitoring also discovers new vulnerabilities and the remediation process continues in this cycle.
So What is Vulnerability Remediation?
Vulnerability remediation is the goal of all vulnerability management systems and a concrete continuously developing risk-based vulnerability management system is the only reliable way to protect enterprises from malicious data infringement in the long term.
Christian Scott is the founder and operator of Malware Brains, a comprehensive cybersecurity website dedicated to educating individuals and businesses about malware and its impacts on society. With over 25 years of collective industry experience, Christian and his team of experts provide unbiased, factual information to help users understand and mitigate the risks associated with malicious software.
