Vulnerability remediation involves the fixing or patching of cybersecurity weaknesses that are detected in applications, networks and enterprise assets. Before, vulnerability remediation was a manual procedure. Nowadays, it’s more automated with advanced threat intelligence, data science and predictive algorithms assisting security professionals to know which vulnerabilities should be remediated first.

It is essential to remember that the end result of vulnerability management is remediation. One of the vital KPIs of a vulnerability management program is how many high-risk vulnerabilities are neutralized or removed before essential assets, confidential data and systems are compromised.

Why is Vulnerability Remediation Important?

Partners, customers, regulators and employees expect companies to put in place processes and policies that effectively and continuously protect data from malicious loss and accidental exposure. There is also zero tolerance for system slowdowns or disruptions. In short, meeting vulnerability remediation challenges has become an essential business activity.

Where Are Organizations Going Wrong In Terms Of Vulnerability Remediation?

From the onset, many organizations have an outdated idea of what vulnerability remediation involves. It’s not just about scanning your networks for cyber threats. An all-inclusive tactic to vulnerability management includes identifying, reporting, assessing and prioritizing exposures. Most importantly, it also involves risk context. 

Instead of just scanning for security breaches, a comprehensive approach to vulnerability remediation shows you how those gaps could be exploited and the aftermath of the occurrence.

Therefore, vulnerability remediation when executed correctly takes a mature approach where all aspects work harmoniously to reduce risk to business-critical assets. That is the objective all IT professionals and IT administrators should follow. 

Also, if you start the first principles, you can fail when it comes to implementation. With that in mind, we have highlighted some of the challenges organizations face when managing vulnerabilities. 

1. Failing to Correctly Prioritize Threats

   The inability to appropriately rank exposures is one of the most damaging issues that organizations currently face within the context of vulnerability management. Many organizations identify security gaps through scanning, then proceed to the remediation stage. On some level, that kind of urgency is understandable. But it is short-sighted and creates more risk.

   IT administrators and IT professionals of different organizations need to focus on prioritization through CVSS. Failure to prioritize it properly may lead to wasted resources as IT teams work towards addressing exposures that pose no real risk to critical business assets.

   Risk and threats will make the organization become vulnerable in different ways. The best way to remediate risk is to focus on the percentage of exposures that can be exploited. When it’s done in the right way, this level of prioritization can eliminate 99 percent of risk to sensitive business systems.

   What’s the best way to benefit from this approach to prioritization? Using a cutting-edge patch management solution that prioritizes exposures by using attack-centric risk context. An organization can use a tool that goes beyond limited CVSS scoring and shows the full picture of how likely each vulnerability is to be exploited and the risk each exploit poses to the assets.

2. Not Using a Continuous Approach

   The best way to utilize a vulnerability management program is ongoing rather than periodic. If organizations do not take a constant approach, they will struggle to control the flow of vulnerabilities and build up vulnerability debt. That’s a serious issue.

   Considering how hard it is to stay on top of emerging vulnerabilities, working with a constant backlog of security issues to address can make the whole situation unsustainable. Instead of irregular scanning and remediation, IT professionals can use an ongoing approach that is centered on automated and continuous vulnerability identification. This is one of the essential ways to develop a robust security posture that is defined by constant improvement.

3. Poor Communication and Unclear Organizational Structure

   When security teams do not have clear lines of communication and the right organizational structure, problems are certain to slip through the cracks. Too often, team members do not have clear roles, and they do not understand where they fit within the overall vulnerability management framework.

   When team members have clear roles with well-defined responsibilities, they can work together effectively. Instead of working in isolation and missing the greater picture, each person can work to meet their responsibilities and achieve their specific objectives. Also, they know how their work relates to the roles and responsibilities of others.

   Therefore, it’s important that the company’s leadership understand and are fully invested in the program, given how strong cybersecurity has become an essential strategic objective.

Vulnerability Remediation Issues

The consequences of failing to successfully manage vulnerabilities have never been higher. One data breach can lead to financial damage and the number of breaches continues to rise, without fail, every year. Truly, vulnerability remediation has left the realm of being just an IT expenditure – it should be a key business objective.

Therefore, to make that a reality, it’s essential to know that vulnerability management should be a continuous and multi-stage process. It’s also important to address the problems that snare so many smart IT departments to successfully manage vulnerabilities: the lack of organization and communication among teams and leaders.

The approach can pay huge dividends in terms of avoiding these drawbacks. As mentioned above, the best thing that can be done is to incorporate powerful vulnerability management tools that offer proper prioritization guidance and critical risk context.

Once your underlying approach is ideal and you are armed with the right tools, your enterprise will be far ahead of your competitors when it comes to protecting your most valuable assets. It’s also essential to get the services of experienced and professional IT companies that can help you with vulnerability remediation services. 

Consequently, if you need a cybersecurity tool that can create a strong troubleshooting background, with a focus on vulnerability remediation, choose Vicarius. Vicarius is a vulnerability management software that targets cybersecurity officers and operators, as well as IT managers and operators from the U.S. market.

 

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Mitigation and remediation are two words that are used a lot in cybersecurity. Most times they are used interchangeably. Although there is a stark contrast between them, both play a major role in security service providers’ risk-related decisions. In this post, we will take a closer look at both strategies and how threat intelligence contributes to each.

Mitigation Versus Remediation: Knowing the Differences

Remediation and mitigation are both a direct result of risk assessment, following the discovery of a new or advanced persistent threat (APT). Remediation involves the removal of threat when it can be eliminated. On the other hand, mitigation involves creating tactics to reduce a threat’s negative impact when it cannot be eliminated. Remediation is straightforward because it ascertains attack patterns using indicators of compromise (IoCs). For instance, when a scan catches a vulnerability, it has to be patched effectively in order to prevent malicious individuals from exploiting it. The immediate objective of vulnerability remediation is to stop threats from entering the network by closing security holes. In mitigation, removing the threat is non-negotiable, as it may lead to service disruption. Mitigation involves conducting risk assessments in order to measure the risk profile of a specific threat and ensure that the remaining risks are acceptable. Unlike remediation, a vulnerability can be left unaddressed for the time being provided it does not present offensive risks or threats. Once a vulnerability has been discovered, the best solution is to remediate it. In other words, allow IT professionals or IT administrators to fix or patch the vulnerability before it can become a security threat. Generally, it’s the organization’s IT security team, system administrators and system owners who come together to know which actions are suitable. Remediation can be as complex as replacing a fleet of physical servers across an organization’s network or as simple as applying a readily available software patch. When remediation activities are finalized, it’s best to always run another vulnerability scan to confirm that the vulnerability has been fully resolved. Nevertheless, sometimes remediation is not possible, for many reasons. Firstly, not all vulnerabilities need to be fixed. For instance, if the vulnerability is identified in Adobe Flash Player but the use of Flash Player is already disabled in all applications and web browsers company-wide, there is no need for action. Also, sometimes you may be prevented from taking remediation action by a technology issue, where a patch is not yet available for the vulnerability in question. Other times, you may experience setbacks from your own organization. This often occurs when a vulnerability is on a customer-facing system and your company wants to avoid the downtime needed to patch a vulnerability. In those cases, the concept of mitigation will come into play. That’s a process that reduces the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited. For instance, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation can route suspicious traffic to a centralized location where it is filtered. Generally, mitigation is not the final step in dealing with a vulnerability. It’s more of a way to buy time for the company to either wait for the technology to be released or find a more suitable time to schedule downtime in the system. In the long run, fixing a network security issue is better than blocking the port that could expose it.

How Mitigation and Remediation Figure in the Kill Chain

Nowadays, organizations know better. Rather than assume their applications are impenetrable, they are searching for proactive ways to uncover ongoing attacks through computer forensics, penetration testing or threat intelligence. Therefore, many IT security experts understand that they need to go beyond the kill chain model to more effectively address attacks. Their solution is through mitigation and remediation techniques guided by the fact that attacks do not stop with interruption. Let’s take a closer look at the steps in a kill chain:

1. Reconnaissance: Attackers research the target by looking at public Internet records for expired domains or certificates they can use for attacks.
2. Weaponization: Once weaknesses are spotted in the target’s network, cyber attackers create the payload they will use to infiltrate defenses.
3. Delivery: This is the actual act of delivering a malicious payload. Links embedded in spam, phishing emails or malware-laced email attachments are normally used.
4. Exploitation: This only occurs when attackers choose to enter a network by abusing a vulnerability in a system or connected device.
5. Installation: Attackers install malware on a vulnerable system in the network to elevate access privileges, steal data or gain control.
6. Command and Control: This involves the use of a command and control server to communicate with infected hosts within the target’s network.
7. Actions on Objectives: Attackers deliver the final blow to the target network, often by exfiltrating data or shutting down operations.

Knowing the elements that make up the kill chain allows cybersecurity professionals to take the right action to prevent attacks. Incident responders can redirect bad traffic to black holes during an ongoing DDoS attack. Additionally, if a similar incident occurs in the future, the best practices they followed in the past can be reapplied, reducing damage and downtime.

How Threat Intelligence Improves Both Processes

IT security experts depend on threat feeds to offer actionable intelligence for their mitigation or vulnerability remediation techniques. Threats are often documented in publicly available databases. To make sense of innumerable datasets, they can use aggregated threat intelligence for faster mitigation and remediation. External data feeds give cybersecurity specialists access to accurate and real-time information which include the following:

1. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could be signs of malicious connections.
2. Domain infrastructure data that reveals registrants, organization data, email addresses and other information, which may be tied to ongoing publicized attacks.
3. Reputation scores to know how safe or unsafe accessing a particular domain is.
4. A list of domains that resolve to a particular IP address and could reveal ties between both known and unknown malicious hosts.

Threat intelligence empowers security experts by giving them access to structured data to support their remediation and mitigation processes. While policy exceptions and other controls may hold them back from implementing remediation methods, threat intelligence enables them to gain better visibility into all potential attack vectors. If you need a cybersecurity tool for vulnerability remediation, vulnerability mitigation and protecting your data against cyber threats, choose Vicarius. Vicarius is a vulnerability management software that targets cybersecurity officers and operators, as well as IT managers and operators from the U.S. market.   Photo by Alice Yamamura on Unsplash