What is Threat and Vulnerability Management?

A threat is a danger that arises when a cybercriminal exploits security vulnerabilities to compromise data and systems. It could be phishing attempts, malware infections, insider threats, etc. A vulnerability is a security weakness in a system or application that cybercriminals exploit to get unauthorized access or plan an attack.

Cyber threats and vulnerabilities can disrupt operations, damage reputation, and lead to financial losses.

With an effective threat and vulnerability management program, organizations can identify, analyze, prioritize, and remediate security risks. It involves continuously monitoring and applying stronger security measures to prevent attacks, data theft, malware infections, and compliance failures.

In this article, we will discuss threat and vulnerability management, the difference between them, key components, how they work, benefits, challenges, and best practices.

What is Threat and Vulnerability Management?

A threat in cybersecurity (or cyber threat) is a danger to your organization’s systems, networks, and applications that comes through the internet. It compromises the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of a system or data. Threats can come from within an organization (internal) or outside of an organization (external).

For example, when a cybercriminal launches a DDoS attack, it is external. When an employee accidentally does something that leads to exposing sensitive information, it is internal. There are various forms of threats, such as:

• Malware: Ransomware, viruses, and spyware that aim to compromise systems and steal data.

• Phishing: It tricks individuals to click on a malicious link or download a malicious attachment and give up sensitive information.

• Advanced persistent threats (APTs): Stealthy cyber attacks that stay undetected in systems for a longer time and keep compromising more systems and data.

• Insider threats: Employees or contractors knowingly or unknowingly become the cause behind data breaches or other attacks.

A vulnerability is a weakness in a system, process, or application that threat actors find and exploit to gain unauthorized access and launch a cyberattack. This way, they can steal data and disrupt operations, demand ransom, and harm your organization in various other ways. Vulnerabilities arise from:

• Unpatched software: Software with security flaws that are left untreated becomes a vulnerability.

• Weak credentials: Easy-to-guess passwords and single-factor authentication are easy for attackers to break and gain access.

• Misconfigurations: Improper system settings, such as weak firewall controls, can become a vulnerability.

• Zero-day exploits: These are the newly discovered vulnerabilities for which no patch is available, but attackers find and exploit them.

While threats are internal or external forces looking for a security gap to exploit, vulnerabilities are a type of security weakness that exist within an organization’s infrastructure that threat actors want to exploit. Threats and vulnerabilities are both a danger to an organization’s cybersecurity.

Threat and vulnerability management is a continuous cybersecurity process to identify, assess, prioritize, and eliminate security threats and vulnerabilities existing in an organization’s IT infrastructure. It helps reduce the likelihood of attacks, protect your data from attackers, and minimize the impact of an attack.

When vulnerability management integrates with threat intelligence, you get a complete view of an organization’s IT assets and security risks around them. If you know where the vulnerability or threat lies, finding a solution and eliminating those risks becomes easier.

Need for Threat and Vulnerability Management

Modern organizations have complex IT infrastructure with multiple cloud environments, remote work culture, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, etc. All of this increases their attack surface and is a target for cybercriminals. It is a treat for attackers who continuously hunt for weak points in your IT infrastructure to exploit.

You get one step ahead of attackers with a solid threat and vulnerability management strategy. It allows you to identify, analyze, and remediate risks before they catch the eyes of criminals, and safeguard your data, reputation, and operations. Let’s find out why threat and vulnerability management is essential for your business.

• Eliminates cyber threats: Cybercriminals develop new attack methods to steal your data. Threat and vulnerability management identifies those threats and vulnerabilities, analyzes their attack vectors, and eliminates them before attackers could find them to harm you.

• Minimizes financial loss: A single data breach can cost you millions. Threat and vulnerability management reduces the chances of data breach, saving you from costly fines, legal consequences, and reputational damage.

• Cloud and remote work security: As businesses move to cloud-based infrastructure and remote work models, they become more vulnerable. Threat and vulnerability management helps you monitor and locate security weaknesses in cloud environments and endpoints connected to your network, and protect them from cyber threats.

• Improves customer trust: Customers trust you with their data. Business partners expect advanced cybersecurity measures to secure their confidential and employee information. Threat and vulnerability management helps you implement stronger security and data protection measures, such as granular access controls, MFA, zero trust security, etc. Safeguarding data maintains customer trust and builds long-term business relationships.

• Prioritization: All vulnerabilities and threats don’t pose the same level of risk. Through threat and vulnerability management, you can prioritize threats based on exploitability, business impact, and severity. This will help you resolve more important and dangerous threats first and get on a safer side.

• Maintain compliance: Regulatory bodies impose strict security requirements for many industries, such as healthcare, finance, defense, etc. Consequences could be severe if you fail to align with the guidelines. Threat and vulnerability management ensures that your organization meets compliance requirements according to the latest standards.

Threat Management vs Vulnerability Management

Below we discuss threat management vs vulnerability management to understand their different aspects of risk elimination.

Key Components of Threat and Vulnerability Management

There are many components in threat and vulnerability management – discovery, assessment, prioritization, remediation, monitoring, etc. Each of them plays an important role. So, let’s talk about different components of threat and vulnerability management:

• Asset discovery and inventory: You need full visibility into your IT infrastructure to be able to protect all your assets. Asset discovery and inventory identifies and catalogues all your digital assets, such as servers, cloud services, IoT devices, applications, and endpoints.

• Threat intelligence: Threat intelligence is a collection of useful data on threats that lets you understand attack patterns, track threat actors’ path, their impacts, and so on. You can use this resource to understand an attack’s purpose and block it before it harms your business. Threat and vulnerability management integrates with threat intelligence to prioritize vulnerabilities and threats and remediate them proactively.

• Vulnerability assessment and scanning: Threat and vulnerability management involves scanning your organization’s systems, networks, and applications for vulnerabilities. A single weakness can wreck your systems to cause data theft, legal proceedings, reputation damage, and heavy fines.

As part of cybersecurity threat and vulnerability management, you can identify unpatched software, misconfigurations, and security weaknesses using automated scanning tools and manual penetration testing. You need to assess your security posture regularly to detect remaining security gaps and bridge them to secure your data and systems from attackers.

• Risk prioritization: Vulnerabilities create a security gap for attackers to enter your systems, networks, and applications to harm your business in various ways. But, all vulnerabilities do not pose the same risk level. Some vulnerabilities give attackers full system access, while others are low-risk.

Risk prioritization in threat and vulnerability management helps you focus on remediating high-risk vulnerabilities first. You can use factors like risk scoring, business impact, and exploitability to categorize threats from high risk to low risk and fix them accordingly.

• Remediation strategies: When you identify and prioritize security risks, you must immediately remediate them to protect your data from attackers. Threat and vulnerability management includes remediation strategies, such as deploying security patches, updating software, reconfiguring system settings, and enforcing access controls.

In case no immediate fix is available, it offers mitigation approaches, such as implementing network and data segmentation, applying virtual patching, and using temporary control settings.

• Continuous monitoring: Security efforts are not a one-time process. You need to monitor your systems, applications, and networks continuously to detect and eliminate vulnerabilities and threats. You can use advanced security tools, such as an intrusion detection system (IDS), SIEM platforms, and EDR solutions, to catch known and unknown threats and vulnerabilities in real-time and prevent attacks.

• Incident response: Threat and vulnerability management includes developing an incident response plan to address security flaws. An incident response plan consists of certain steps that you need to follow – detecting and containing threats, removing them from systems, and implementing corrective measures to prevent recurrence. When a security incident occurs, you can use this plan to mitigate the threat and minimize the impact. It will also buy you time to come up with a solid remediation plan.

• Security awareness and training: Not all employees have cybersecurity knowledge, and this makes them the weakest link in cyberattacks.

You need to conduct regular training and awareness programs for employees on cybersecurity. Tell them how to recognize phishing attempts and social engineering attacks. Instruct them to follow cybersecurity best practices and protect data. This helps reduce the chances of human errors and prevent them from becoming victims of cyberattacks.

How Threat and Vulnerability Management Works?

Threat and vulnerability management helps organizations address and minimize threats and vulnerabilities before they harm your systems. You need to follow the step-by-step process to identify, analyze, prioritize, remediate, verify, and document all the discovered threats and vulnerabilities.

Let us understand how threat and vulnerability management works:

Identifying Threats and Vulnerabilities

Threat and vulnerability management helps you identify and list all security weaknesses and cyber threats before they become a serious problem for your organization. To find threats and vulnerabilities, consider following these methods:

• Vulnerability scanning: Allow your security teams to use automated threat and vulnerability management tools to scan applications, devices, and networks for known vulnerabilities, such as unpatched software, weak configurations, outdated software, etc.

• Threat intelligence gathering: Integrate real-time intelligence to get real-time information of emerging threats, attack methodologies, and malware campaigns.

• Attack surface mapping: Assess data flows and network architecture to identify the most exposed assets within your network. These assets could be more vulnerable and attract external threats.

Analyze Vulnerabilities and Threats

After you discover threats and vulnerabilities, the next step you need to take is to analyze or evaluate the impact of vulnerabilities and threats on your organization. This includes:

• Examining exploitability: Evaluate how easily cybercriminals can exploit a vulnerability. Check whether threats and vulnerabilities are known to security teams.

• Business impact: If cybercriminals successfully launch attacks on your systems, assess how it affects your financial stability, data integrity, business operations, and confidentiality.

• Threat mapping: Classify threats based on attacker tactics, procedures, and techniques to predict attack scenarios. You can do this by using frameworks, such as MITRE ATT&CK.

Prioritizing Threats and Vulnerabilities

Organizations discover plenty of threats and vulnerabilities every year. They need to categorize them based on the severity level of issues. Since not every security issue is equally dangerous, prioritizing threats and vulnerabilities is essential to resolve critical ones first and secure your systems. You can prioritize security risks based on:

• Severity levels: Assign risk score using Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to understand which vulnerability needs immediate focus. However, these scores are not always determined by urgency, you need to focus on other factors as well to prioritize threats and vulnerabilities.
• Asset value: List all your high-value assets, such as cloud infrastructure, intellectual properties, and customer databases. Evaluate their importance for your business and check whether any of them have vulnerabilities or are exposed to threats.

• Threat activity: Check out security communities to verify if attackers are already exploiting similar vulnerabilities. If so, give them the first priority and remediate them immediately.

• Regulatory compliance: Check whether vulnerabilities and threats influence regulatory compliance. If it is a yes, immediately eliminate the risks to stay aligned with regulatory requirements and avoid fines.

Remediation and Mitigation

When you are done prioritizing threats and vulnerabilities, it’s time to remediate and mitigate those risks. Here’s how you can do this:

• Patch and updates: Apply security patches and software updates to fix known vulnerabilities and threats.

• Configuration changes: Adjust your system settings, firewall rules, and access controls to temporarily stop cybercriminals from attacking your systems. This will help you eliminate the security gap until a fix is available.

• Security hardening: Strengthen your defense mechanism through multi-factor authentication, intrusion detection systems, strong security policies, and encryption.

• Mitigation strategies: When an immediate fix or patch is unavailable, deploy a temporary solution, such as application whitelisting, behavioral monitoring, and network segmentation, to minimize exposure.

Verification and Validation

After completing the cycle from identification to remediation, you need to verify if you have applied security measures correctly. Also, check whether any remaining threats and vulnerabilities exist in your IT infrastructure. For this, follow the below methods:

• Re-scanning systems: Run threat and vulnerability scans to confirm that all the patches are applied correctly.

• Penetration testing: Allow security teams to simulate real-world attack scenarios to detect remaining threats and vulnerabilities within your network.

• Security policy review: Evaluate all the changes you made to protect your systems from attackers and verify if the changes are aligned with security policies and industry compliance requirements.

Documenting and Reporting

It is essential to track how you tackled security incidents. For this, you must document every incident and create a detailed report. Use it as a reference to handle similar threats in the future.

• Documentation: Document all the resolved threats and vulnerabilities, timelines, systems impacted, the root cause of the attack, how you identified, contained, and fixed it, and other important information.

• Internal audits: Perform internal audits and generate reports for regulatory bodies to show them how you eliminate and manage risks, protect data, and meet compliance.

• Outline procedures: Review past security incidents to refine your security strategies. Improve your incident response plan by outlining the steps and procedures to detect and eliminate risks.

Benefits of an Effective Threat and Vulnerability Management

An effective threat and vulnerability management program strengthens your organization’s security posture. It helps you effectively identify, remediate, and manage threats and vulnerabilities to reduce the attack surface.

Let’s dig deeper into the benefits of threat and vulnerability management:

• Reduces risks: Threat and vulnerability management helps you identify threats and vulnerabilities before attackers find and exploit them. Through continuous monitoring, you can find and fix security issues as soon as they occur to reduce data breaches and other cyberattacks.

• Improves incident response: Threat and vulnerability management improves your incident response plan to detect, assess, and respond to cyber threats more effectively. It prioritizes vulnerabilities based on real-time threat intelligence to reduce response time. This helps security teams contain and neutralize threats before they escalate.

• Strengthens business continuity: You can reduce downtimes by eliminating security incidents and system vulnerabilities. It protects your IT infrastructure from cyber attacks and gives you uninterrupted business operations.

• Better decision making: Threat and vulnerability management gives you complete visibility into security incidents so that you can make informed business decisions backed by accurate data to stop cyber attacks. It also helps security teams prioritize their actions based on business impact, exploitability, CVSS score, and threat intelligence.

• Increases trust: Protecting business and customer data with a strong threat and vulnerability management plan helps you build trust among your customers, partners, and investors.

• Financial benefit: With threat management and vulnerability assessment, you can better comply with the industry standards to prevent non-compliance issues. You can also prevent financial losses due to ransom payments and recovering from attacks.

Challenges in Threat and Vulnerability Management

Although threat and vulnerability management is essential for strengthening your organization’s security posture, you may sometimes face challenges in implementing the program in your IT infrastructure. These challenges can blur your ability to detect cyber threats and give you a hard time responding to them.

Here are some of the challenges you may face while implementing the program.

• Increasing volume of threats: Cybercriminals find new attack techniques and vulnerabilities to attack organizations’ systems, networks, and applications. With a lot of systems and endpoints in place, the number of vulnerabilities and threats also increases, making it difficult for you to prioritize and manage them. For example, zero-day vulnerabilities pose a major risk as immediate patches are not available for them.

Solution: Use an automated threat and vulnerability management tool to scan for security issues continuously. You can also use threat intelligence platforms to get updates on emerging threats and their impacts on businesses.

• Insider threats and human errors: Employees sometimes expose sensitive data unintentionally through weak passwords, misconfigurations, or phishing scams. Insider threats, on the other hand, could happen due to an angry employee, corporate espionage, etc.

Solution: Use tools to analyze user behavior and detect anomalies. You can also conduct a cybersecurity awareness program to educate employees and enforce strict password and authentication policies to limit exposure.

• Complexity of IT environments: Modern businesses have complex IT environments, including multi-cloud and remote work. This increases your attack surface and complexity in managing threats and vulnerabilities.

Solution: Apply network segmentation method to isolate important systems from attack vectors. You can also deploy unified security management platforms to monitor and protect complex IT environments and improve visibility into multi-cloud setups.

• Slow patch management: When you detect threats and vulnerabilities, you need to apply patches immediately to secure the environment. Due to compatibility issues, sometimes it could take longer to apply patches. As a result, the systems are exposed for quite a while.

Solution: Establish an automated patch management system to update and apply patches automatically to known risks. You can use temporary security rules, such as limit access control, isolate systems, apply MFA, and use strong passwords.

Threat and Vulnerability Management Best Practices

Threat and vulnerability management best practices ensure that your security teams manage vulnerabilities and threats effectively and reduce attack surfaces. Let’s understand some of the best practices that you can follow to improve your security posture.

• Identify and track all your IT assets, including servers, cloud environments, IoT devices, and endpoints.
• Categorize all your assets based on their importance and sensitivity to prioritize security patches easily.
• Use AI-based analytics to study the purpose of attacks and attack vectors.
• Perform a manual and automatic vulnerability scan to identify security issues.
• Identify misconfigurations and unpatched software before attacks find and exploit them.
• Establish a threat and vulnerability management policy for timely updates.
• Enforce least privilege access and strong password policy to limit exposure.
• Develop and test your incident response plan to effectively remediate threats and vulnerabilities.
• Document and report threat and vulnerability management activities for future audits and incident response.

How SentinelOne Can Help?

SentinelOne offers Singularity Vulnerability Management to help organizations manage threats and vulnerabilities in their systems, networks, and applications. The platform provides you with a solid step-by-step plan to identify, contain, prioritize, remediate, and prevent security risks. It aims to protect your data from cyber threats, such as data breaches, phishing attempts, insider threats, third-party risks, and more. Here’s how the platform works:

• Risk assessment: SentinelOne uses automated vulnerability scanners and penetration testing to detect security risks in your systems.
• Prioritization: It lets you prioritize threats based on the likelihood of exploitation and environmental factors.
• Automation: SentinelOne offers automated security controls to simplify security workflows. These controls isolate unmanaged systems and fill security gaps to prevent attacks.

Take a tour to explore SentinelOne’s Singularity Vulnerability Management.

Conclusion

Threat and vulnerability management helps security teams identify, assess, prioritize, and eliminate risks to improve your security posture and compliance with applicable laws and regulations. Integrating threat intelligence, continuous monitoring, and incident response is an effective way to reduce their attack surface and prevent cyber security incidents.

You must prioritize threats and vulnerabilities based on severity scores, business impact, and exploitability to be able to address critical risks first. This keeps you steps ahead of cyber attackers, safeguards your digital assets, and saves you from legal battles and fines.

If you are looking for a reliable threat and vulnerability management solution, try SentinelOne’s Singularity Vulnerability Management. Book a call to explore.