What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management helps organizations identify, assess, prioritize, and eliminate security weaknesses from systems. It reduces risks, strengthens security posture, protects data, and ensures compliance with regulatory standards.

Cybercriminals constantly search for vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access, steal sensitive data, and launch attacks. An effective vulnerability management process allows organizations to fix issues before attackers can exploit vulnerabilities. This helps you avoid emerging threats, improve cyber resilience, and protect assets.

In this article, we’ll explore vulnerability management, types of vulnerabilities, how to prioritize risks, key stages, frameworks, and compliance, benefits, challenges, best practices, and the future of automated vulnerability management.

What is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability Management simply means managing security vulnerabilities across an organization’s IT infrastructure. It is a cyclical, continuous process where security teams identify, prioritize, and eliminate vulnerabilities, threats, and other security risks from systems, networks, and applications to prevent cyberattacks from exploiting them.

Vulnerability management strengthens your security posture and minimizes the risk of attacks. It includes scanning your servers, storage systems, network devices, legacy applications, virtual machines, microservices, APIs, containers, cloud applications, workstations, and more for security weaknesses.

You can compare these security loopholes with your threat intelligence data to find gaps in your security. Security teams can also prioritize the detected vulnerabilities based on how severe they are and address threats before they become an attack. It also enables your IT staff to schedule, upgrade, and patch risks and avoid financial, legal, and compliance issues.

Importance of Vulnerability Management

Implementing a solid vulnerability management program helps you identify and remove security risks before cyber criminals exploit them. This way, it helps prevent cyber threats, such as DDoS attacks, zero-day attacks, unauthorized access, phishing, and more.

Here are some of the reasons why vulnerability management is important to your business:

• Prevents cyber risks: Attackers enter your systems through unpatched vulnerabilities. But vulnerability management identifies and addresses these weak points before attacks can find or exploit them. This prevents data breaches and attacks from harming your organization.

• Optimize IT resources: Security teams face difficulties in managing resources while addressing security flaws. Vulnerability management allows security professionals to prioritize risks and understand which security risks are more important. This way, they can allocate resources to security issues based on their criticality.

• Improves customer trust: Customers and partners share their personal data with organizations and expect you will keep up their trust. Data breaches can break that trust and make you pay huge fines. Vulnerability management ensures your organization complies with industry standards and safeguards your data. This helps in improving long-term business relationships and trust.

• Reduces service downtimes: Cyber attacks can disrupt your operations by hijacking your systems, gaining unauthorized access, and manipulating data. An effective vulnerability management program addresses security incidents faster from systems to reduce the risk of attacks and costly downtimes.

• Better incident response: Vulnerability management proactively identifies and mitigates risks. This means businesses can respond to security incidents effectively and strengthen their security posture.

Difference Between Vulnerability Management and Patch Management

Vulnerability management and patch management are similar cybersecurity processes. Both aim to address vulnerabilities from networks, systems, and applications to improve your organization’s IT security. However, they are different in how they work and also differ in strategies to accomplish their goals.

Common Types of Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities are security weaknesses in systems, applications, and networks that attackers find and exploit to gain unauthorized access, steal data, launch attacks, and disrupt operations. These vulnerabilities may happen due to system misconfigurations, coding bugs, human errors, etc.

Here are some of the types of security vulnerabilities:

• Software vulnerabilities: These vulnerabilities arise from coding errors, security misconfigurations, and unpatched software. Hackers find these weaknesses to inject malware, crash systems, and gain unauthorized access. Examples of software vulnerabilities are SQL injections, zero-day vulnerabilities, buffer overflow attacks, etc.

• Hardware vulnerabilities: Vulnerabilities that exist within physical devices, including routers, IoT devices, and computers, are known as hardware vulnerabilities. These could be a lack of security controls, outdated hardware, and firmware vulnerabilities. Some of the examples of hardware vulnerabilities are malicious USB devices, unsecured data storage, side-channel attacks like Meltdown and Spectre, etc. These vulnerabilities expose confidential information and affect your reputation.

• Cloud vulnerabilities: Organizations rely on third-party cloud providers, but there are many security risks with cloud computing. Some common cloud vulnerabilities are misconfigured cloud storage, improper backup strategies, and insecure APIs. Attackers target these weaknesses to gain access to sensitive user and corporate data stored in cloud environments.

• Network vulnerabilities: These are vulnerabilities in your internal or external network infrastructure. They come from open ports, weak encryption methods, misconfigured firewalls, etc. Cybercriminals exploit network weaknesses to execute DDoS attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and data breaches. For instance, through DDoS attacks, they aim to overwhelm your networks and make your services unavailable.

• Human-based vulnerabilities: Human errors or human-based vulnerabilities include weak passwords, unintentionally exposing sensitive data, sharing sensitive data or passwords with others without realizing the consequences, poor cybersecurity hygiene, and more. These errors make it easier for attackers to exploit the weaknesses and trick employees into disclosing confidential information.

• Zero-day vulnerabilities: A zero-day vulnerability is a vulnerability that a cyber criminal discovers and exploits before the organization can know about it or fix it. Since this vulnerability is not known to the vendor or security teams, they have “zero days” to release the patch. This is why zero-day vulnerabilities are one of the most dangerous ones. If attackers find them, they can easily target and enter your system to steal data and disrupt operations without getting detected.

• IoT vulnerabilities: Most IoT vulnerabilities emerge from unpatched firmware, weak authentication mechanisms, and default credentials. For example, attackers launch botnet attacks in order to exploit these devices and take control of them.

Risk Prioritization in Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability prioritization is an important step in the vulnerability management process. Organizations face thousands of vulnerabilities, so they need a definite way to prioritize those vulnerabilities. It allows security teams to focus on addressing cyber threats based on how severe they are and the impact they can pose on your business.

Let’s understand how to prioritize vulnerability management:

Evaluate the Severity Using CVSS Scores

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a numerical score that helps security teams understand the severity of security risks. The scores are based on factors, such as type of risks, the importance of systems they compromised, the type of data stored in affected systems, business impact, ease of exploitation, and more.

Vulnerabilities are classified as:

• Low: A CVSS score between 0.1 and 3.9 is considered as a minor security risk. This means it doesn’t require immediate attention.

• Medium: A CVSS score between 4.0 and 6.9 is considered as moderate security risks. Organizations can decide whether to take immediate action or later based on their risk appetite.

• High: A CVSS score between 7.0 and 8.9 is considered a significant security risk. Here, organizations need to take prompt and immediate actions to remediate these risks.

• Critical: The score between 9.0 and 10.0 is considered a severe threat where organizations must take immediate action before the weaknesses become severe risks.

Analyze Exploitability and Threats

Vulnerabilities with high CVSS scores are not always threats. Security professionals need to analyze the following parameters:

• Availability of exploit: If an exploit exists and is accessible, the severity level increases.

• Threat intelligence data: Security professionals must monitor real-world attacks and compare their threat intelligence data with the security risk they have detected. Check whether cybercriminals exploit those vulnerabilities.

• Ease of exploitation: Some vulnerabilities require high-end techniques, whereas others can require minimal effort to exploit the weaknesses. Organizations need to analyze how easily a vulnerability can be exploited. If security teams find that cybercriminals can easily exploit your vulnerabilities, they need to address and mitigate them immediately.

Evaluate Business Impact

Organizations need to evaluate the impact of vulnerability in their business to prioritize the risks. They are required to check:

• Critical systems affected: Check if a vulnerability has impacted your critical systems, such as customer databases, production environments, and financial systems. If so, prioritize vulnerability remediation over other work.

• Downtime and losses: Some vulnerabilities can cause outages, which can cause revenue loss and reputational damage. Security teams must check how bad these vulnerabilities are to cause downtimes and losses.

• Data sensitivity: Verify if the corporate and customer data are at risk due to discovered vulnerabilities. If yes, remediate it immediately.

Check Patch Availability

If you find security patches available for the detected vulnerabilities, deploy them immediately to secure your data from cyber threats. Security teams also need to test patches to avoid disruptions. If there is no patch available, security teams must take alternate actions, such as restricting security controls, network access, configuration, etc.

Consider Exposure and Attack Surface

Organizations need to assess exposed systems, such as web applications, to know where the higher risks are and how much they can affect your systems compared to internal-only systems. If the vulnerability is serious, organizations must address it quickly to secure their systems, such as the domain controller and the database.

Vulnerability Management Process: Key Stages

Vulnerability management is an important component of cybersecurity that allows organizations to identify, assess, prioritize, and eliminate security weaknesses before they harm your operations and steal data. A vulnerability management process follows the below key stages:

#1 Vulnerability Discovery

In vulnerability management, you first need to identify security weaknesses across your IT infrastructure. Create an inventory of all your assets, including hardware, software, and network devices, and monitor for vulnerabilities. Scan these systems for vulnerabilities, threats, and risks.

You can also perform penetration testing and simulate various cyberattack scenarios to find weaknesses that scanners might miss. By identifying weaknesses and risks continuously, you can better understand your security posture.

#2 Risk Prioritization

Once you identify security weaknesses in your system, it’s time to prioritize them based on how severe they are. Consider business impacts, patches available, unknown threats, attack surface, risk appetite, etc., to prioritise threats. You can use frameworks like CVSS to rank vulnerabilities as low, medium, high, and critical.

This process helps security teams determine how dangerous a threat is and how easily attackers can exploit it to enter your IT infrastructure. Find out whether the vulnerability is present in internal systems or external-facing applications. Also, evaluate whether the vulnerability affects your confidential data or customer information. Resolve highly critical security loopholes first to protect your sensitive data and systems and avoid financial losses.

#3 Remediation

After identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities, it’s time to eliminate the discovered risks before they turn into a cyber attack. Vulnerability management process uses different strategies, such as applying patches and updates, changing configuration, applying stricter security controls, and improving incident response to mitigate weaknesses. Organizations also offer employee awareness training to remediate attacks more efficiently.

With faster remediation, you can prevent threats from becoming a security disaster. It will also reduce financial losses, compliance violations, and data breaches. Ensure a solid threat mitigation plan is in place to be able to address vulnerabilities without disrupting business operations.

#4 Verification and Monitoring

Once you eliminate security risks, verify if there are vulnerabilities still existing in your systems. Establish a continuous monitoring process to detect new security threats and resolve them. If needed, you may need a change in response plan or additional remediation steps, such as reconfiguring systems, testing alternative security controls, etc.

You must also align your security efforts with industry and regulatory standards, such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and more. Conduct internal security audits to confirm compliance and identify areas for improvement.

Despite best efforts, vulnerabilities could still be exploited before you apply patches. For this, organizations need an effective incident response plan to contain and remediate security breaches, investigate the root causes, and use threat intelligence to prevent threats.

Vulnerability Management Frameworks and Compliance

Vulnerability management process helps you protect digital assets, reduce cybersecurity risks, and maintain compliance. It has various frameworks and industry standards that you can follow to implement vulnerability management practices effectively.

Vulnerability Management Frameworks

Vulnerability management framework consists of best practices and guidelines designed to help you identify, analyze, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities within your IT infrastructure. Various recognized cybersecurity frameworks outline guidelines for managing vulnerabilities. They are:

• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): NIST Cybersecurity Framework manages cybersecurity risks by providing guidelines for identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery. With these guidelines, you can easily prioritize and mitigate vulnerabilities and secure your data from theft.

• Center for Internet Security (CIS) Controls: CIS Controls includes best practices to reduce cyber risks, including a vulnerability scanning process, prioritizing remediation based on exploitability and risk factor, and using automated tools to track and patch weaknesses.

• MITRE ATT&CK Framework: The MITRE ATT&CK framework provides a knowledge base of techniques, tactics, and procedures that help you mitigate risks. With this framework, you can map vulnerabilities to real-world attack scenarios, understand how attackers exploit vulnerabilities, and develop defense mechanisms based on threat intelligence.

• ISO/IEC 27001: The ISO/IEC 27001 standard defines best practices for an Information Security Management System (ISMS). It includes a risk assessment guideline, how to implement security controls for vulnerability management, and how to monitor and improve security processes regularly.

Compliance in Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management involves guiding organizations to follow regulatory standards to protect business and customer data. This process involves performing regular monitoring and assessments to detect cyber threats and ensuring you meet regulatory requirements.

Various regulatory bodies mandate vulnerability management for your organization to safeguard from fines, legal consequences, and reputational damage. They are:

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): If your organization handles and stores personal data of EU citizens, you need to follow GDPR compliance requirements and implement strong security measures to prevent data from theft.

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS): If your organization processes credit card transactions regularly, you must comply with PCI DSS. It mandates regular vulnerability scanning, patching and requires penetration testing to validate security measures.

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): If you are a healthcare organization and handle patients’ personal and insurance data, you must comply with HIPAA standards to protect patient data from threats. It provides regular risk assessments and vulnerability mitigation to safeguard your business from reputational damage.

Vulnerability Management Benefits

Vulnerability management helps your organization address security risks, protect data, and comply with industry standards. Let’s discuss in detail various vulnerability management benefits for your organization.

1. Reduces security risks: Cyber threats are expanding to various sectors and businesses, and attackers look for vulnerabilities in your IT systems, networks, and software.

Vulnerability management helps you identify security weaknesses and remove them before they become serious issues. It minimizes your business’s exposure to phishing attempts, zero-day exploits, and ransomware attacks and improves your operations and data integrity.

2. Prevents data breaches: Cybercriminals exploit security vulnerabilities to steal confidential information, financial records, and business operations details.

Vulnerability management helps organizations identify, prioritize, and patch weaknesses to stop attackers from gaining unauthorized access. This protects your customers’ data, upholds their trust, and avoids costly fines and legal consequences.

3. Optimizes IT resources: Recovering data and operations after an attack consumes significant resources and money. You may also face regulatory fines and legal battles that can cost you millions.

An effective vulnerability management identifies and mitigates risks before they could cause any damage to your business. It reduces your financial burden and workloads on IT security teams, helps them allocate resources optimally, and improves security posture.

4. Improves incident response: Organizations need to respond quickly to cyber risks to minimize damage and prevent data breaches.

A solid vulnerability management process helps you find and fix security vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them. The process integrates with threat intelligence and automated scanning tools, so security teams can track vulnerabilities and prioritize high-risk threats. With a clear view of security incidents, you can better prepare a strong incident response plan to eliminate them easily and protect your data and systems.

Common Vulnerability Management Challenges

Vulnerability management comes with many challenges that organizations need to overcome to maintain a strong security posture. Let’s talk about them:

• Too many vulnerabilities: Organizations with complex IT infrastructure can have hundreds of vulnerabilities. It becomes difficult for them to prioritize, fix, and manage each one of them. A small mistake can result in security gaps and cost you dearly.

• Lack of visibility: Incomplete inventories and shadow IT make it difficult for security teams to track all systems. Unmonitored systems and vulnerabilities in them provide a path for attackers to enter and increase the risk of attacks.

• Slow patch deployment: Applying patches is necessary to resolve vulnerabilities in systems. If you delay this, attackers get time to find and exploit unpatched vulnerabilities to target your systems. They can cause operational disruptions and compatibility issues. In many cases, vendors release patches late, which leaves your systems exposed for a long time.

• Prioritization difficulty: CVSS scores don’t always show the right score for vulnerabilities because it doesn’t consider real-world risks.

• Addressing zero-day vulnerabilities: Unknown or new vulnerabilities with no patches available force organizations to rely on security controls, network segmentation, and threat intelligence until patches are available. If an attacker gets to these vulnerabilities, you won’t get the time to prepare for it.

Vulnerability Management Best Practices

Organizations must follow industry best practices to identify, assess, prioritize, validate, and eliminate security risks. Below are vulnerability management best practices you must follow to detect and mitigate risks successfully:

• Maintain asset inventory: Allow your security teams to get full visibility into all your IT assets, including on-premises systems, IoT devices, third-party software, and cloud services.

• Conduct regular scans: Scan your IT infrastructure regularly to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities. Schedule scans at regular intervals and after you make some major changes to your systems.

• Prioritize risks: Use a risk-based approach and consider business impact, exploitability, threat intelligence, and asset importance while prioritizing vulnerabilities.

• Use alternative controls: Apply alternative security controls, such as access restrictions, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and network segmentation, to fight adversaries.

• Enforce security policies: Establish strict security policies, such as multi-factor authentication, complex passwords, software configurations, and least privilege access, to reduce the risk of exploitation.

AI Vulnerability Management: The Future of Automated Risk Detection

Traditional vulnerability management is not sufficient to beat adaptive cyber threats. Use modern solutions, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve the vulnerability management cybersecurity process. It automates threat detection, risk assessment, and mitigation efforts to save you time. Automated vulnerability management also helps your security teams reduce manual effort and response times, and increase security posture.

AI vulnerability management helps you:

• Monitor network activity, threat intelligence feeds, and system configurations to detect known and unknown threats.
• Utilize ML algorithms to identify zero-day vulnerabilities and attack vectors faster.
• Consider business impact, attack likelihood based on previous data, and exploitability while prioritizing vulnerabilities.
• Identify missing patches, analyze patch dependencies, and deploy patches automatically to secure your system.
• AI-driven models analyze attack patterns, security trends, and user behavior to predict attacks.
• You can use vulnerability management as a service to further simplify the process and let the service provider handle everything for you with your preferred subscription plan.

Vulnerability Management with SentinelOne

SentinelOne offers Singularity Vulnerability Management to help you find, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities and risks in your applications, operating systems, devices, network assets, and other systems. It helps you improve your security posture, align your organization to industry and regulatory requirements, and maintain customer trust.

Here are some of the capabilities of SentinelOne’s vulnerability management:

• Continuous vulnerability assessments to keep finding security risks and threats in your systems
• Superior risk prioritization based on the likelihood of exploitation and environmental factors
• Automated security controls and workflows to simplify operations and close security gaps
• Wide coverage across Windows, Linux, and macOS systems

Take a demo to explore SentinelOne’s vulnerability management.

Conclusion

Vulnerability Management helps organizations protect their digital assets, maintain customer trust, and ensure business continuity. It offers a systematic approach that allows security teams to identify, assess, prioritize, and eliminate security vulnerabilities before attackers get to them.

Implement continuous vulnerability monitoring, risk-based prioritization, and remediation to reduce your attack surface and protect your data and systems. Vulnerability management also aligns with industry standards, frameworks, and regulatory bodies to avoid non-compliance risks. This will save you from hefty fines, reputational damage, and legal consequences.

If you’re looking for a reliable way to find, fix, and manage security vulnerabilities and protect your business, check out SentinelOne’s Singularity Vulnerability Management cybersecurity solution. Explore the platform.