Proper vulnerability management is key to an organization’s success — primarily when it comes to security. It allows you to quickly, efficiently, and in real-time evaluate and mitigate security issues, not only vulnerabilities, but risk, and threats. It is one of the most important frameworks in an organization’s IT infrastructure. How you operate it, implement it, and deployment may vary from business to business – not to mention between different digital environments – nevertheless it must include universal vulnerability management process steps.

What is the vulnerability management process?

The vulnerability management process is a risk-based approach to identify and prioritize your company’s and your product’s vulnerabilities. The process begins with the identification of vulnerabilities that are important to the organization. Those that expose you to risks and future threats.

The identification phase is followed by the prioritization phase which involves identifying the most critical vulnerabilities that need to be addressed first. If you want to improve your vulnerability management process, you need to contact Apiiro.

Goals of the vulnerability management process

The vulnerability management process is an action plan that is used to identify, assess, and manage the risks associated with vulnerabilities. The goal of this process is to ensure that the organization’s assets are protected from the risks associated with vulnerabilities.

Generally, the vulnerability management process includes four steps: identifying, assessing, managing, and communicating. The first step in the vulnerability management process is identifying vulnerabilities. Chinks in your armor that might expose security weaknesses. Organizations need to have a plan in place for what types of vulnerabilities they want to identify in their systems and networks. This plan should include which types of vulnerabilities they want to prioritize as well as how often they will do an assessment on their systems. The second step in the vulnerability management process is assessing the risks associated with these identified vulnerabilities by examining their likelihood of being exploited by attackers and their impact on an organization if it occurs.

And those are just the bare minimum of steps.

As a whole, vulnerability management is a complex process filled with a lot of technical steps and phases. Each organization has to customize its vulnerability management process. Why? On account of multiple factors. For example, how many access points does your system have? Or what is the software being used for? What kind of data, if any, does it procure from your consumers — there’s a vast difference if your client gives you financial data, let’s say for a purchase, then if they don’t. Do you create and design, from scratch your codes, or do you use outsourced coding or open-source code? Who are your clients?

Stages of the vulnerability management process

The type of business, its scale, its reach, everything, will dictate the type of software vulnerability management processes you need. Nevertheless, generally speaking, they will stay close to the following 4 steps.

Assessment

The goal of this stage is to identify vulnerabilities and map them to an organization’s assets. One of the most common techniques for this stage is a vulnerability scan.

A vulnerability scan is a technique used primarily in this stage. It means to find and fix vulnerabilities in the system. It is usually done using automated tools that are updated constantly — not only with new industry vulnerabilities, those that have just recently popped up with new vulnerabilities but with global hacking trends.

The great thing about these tools is that they work by learning — from your system as well as other people’s systems. They deposit new intel in a data pool to which all users automatically have access to.

The vulnerability scan can be done from inside or outside of the network. The latter is called a “black box” test, while the former is called a “white box” test.

Remediation

The second a vulnerability is put in the crosshairs, the next step is to either take them out or at the very least shoot them in the leg — mitigate and take away some of their steam. This includes applying patches, upgrading software, changing configuration, auditing human errors, and dozens of other steps. Treating vulnerabilities takes time and sometimes if they are giving attackers access to your platform, the best your team can do is mine the field — slow them down.

Monitoring and Reporting

Attackers are very persistent viruses — they never give up, they evolve. The net is a breeding ground for them. This means that if they discover you’ve “vaccinated” your system against them, then they will simply develop more virulent variants of their malware. They’ll discover another weak point, uncover another flaw, or simply make their attacks that much more powerful.

During monitoring and reporting your team is basically on the lookout for new attacks, for new tech, for new outside the box thinking – for hackers – that might hurt your interest. Daily, there are over 5 million digital attacks. 20% of them are entirely new. Something companies hadn’t seen before and that requires rapid deployment.

Recovery

The doomsday scenario — that’s the final stage. Your company has to be prepared for the worst. Some companies have had no other choice but to “self-destruct” their systems when an attack has become too overwhelming. Other companies simply go offline due to an attack’s algorithm and how it was staged.

Imagine what that would mean for your organization? The average breach takes about 21 days to fully be fixed — in most of those cases, your system is working at half its capacity. And sometimes, if the breach is too malicious, it’s not even working on that. It’s down and there’s no way of accessing it. During that time you’re not making any sales, your profits have dwindled, your brand is getting punched.

You need back-ups – that are regularly updated and tested – and a “break in case of emergency” protocol.

Implement vulnerability management within an organization

The Facebook outage of 2021, cost the company – for the 5 hours it was out – $65 million. For 5 hours — not the average 21 days that some companies have reported. Every minute ended up costing them $163.565. The reason they didn’t keep hemorrhaging and had everything up within 5 hours was that they had backups, recovery protocols, worst-case scenarios. Because Facebook, like most organizations, understands the importance of implementing a vulnerability management process.

Source: Plato Data Intelligence: PlatoData.io