How to Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?

Every organization is at risk of being compromised. As industry expert Roothshell Security warns, ransomware, social engineering, and malicious insiders target organizations of all sizes. More so, new attacks and threats are increasing in sophistication and frequency. A vulnerability can only be as bad as the threat taking advantage of it and its potential effect on the organization.

Therefore, risk management and security leaders must rate vulnerabilities depending on their risk to enhance the effectiveness of the vulnerability management program. In this post, we’ll discuss how to implement risk-based vulnerability management to help you protect your organization from attack.

What is Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management involves identifying and reconciling vulnerabilities in a company’s infrastructure to prevent unauthorized access from malicious actors. If you conduct the process well, it can help reveal the possible risks an organization is exposed to, enabling them to be addressed in their priorities to avoid expensive data breaches.

Identifying prospective vulnerabilities is vital, and many organizations have adopted vulnerability scanning engines. However, the amount of exploits these scans can reveal is often overwhelming. After the vulnerabilities have been uncovered, the question remains – who takes ownership of that process and the patches that need to be applied?

Risk-based vulnerability management is a cybersecurity process that identifies and remediates possible vulnerabilities that pose the highest risk to the organization.

The demand for this feature has increased tremendously over the last few years due to the increasing complexity in the IT industry and the exponential growth of endpoints. These challenges and business priorities like migrating to the cloud have made optimizing resources and prioritizing activity fundamental.

Risk-based vulnerability management is an effective way of helping IT departments and personnel identify and reconcile various vulnerabilities that have a higher risk of being exploited by malicious players.

Main Components of Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

• Comprehensive risk scores – risk is appraised and calculated in terms of asset criticality, probability of attack, the severity of risk, the potential effect on the organization, etc
• Integrated threat intelligence – information is collected, analyzed, and processed to understand the actor’s intentions and attack behaviours
• Automation – machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and other intelligent automation solutions can automate various tasks in the risk assessment program to optimize limited resources and streamline activity

Advantages of Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

Businesses that leverage risk-based vulnerability management can enjoy multiple benefits such as:

a) Enhanced accuracy

Using threat hunting and threat intelligence can help a company make quicker, data-backed, and more informed decisions in its campaign against malicious actors. This leads to a proactive approach that enables IT managers to concentrate resources and time on the most crucial vulnerabilities in their environment.

b) Wider visibility

Risk-based vulnerability management increases the scope of visibility in every asset on the attack surface. These assets include modern assets, like cloud-based applications and mobile devices, which legacy tools rarely support.

c) Increased productivity

Risk-based vulnerability management utilizes advanced technology to automate most activities in the assessment process. Therefore, it helps the IT team to concentrate on high-value activity and streamline recurring tasks.

d) Continuous protection

Instead of capturing static snapshots of vulnerable information and generating outdated results, an up-to-date risk-based vulnerability management solution continuously monitors the environment and provides real-time insights. Therefore, organizations can progressively identify vulnerabilities as they evolve.

How to Prioritize Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities

Although many organizations experience numerous vulnerabilities in their environment, only a few can pose a grave risk to the organization. Here are some fundamental factors you should consider when prioritizing vulnerabilities:

Determine the acceptable level of risk. Businesses must set the threshold that determines the extent of risk the business can accept. The threshold must be defined based on the required resources to remediate the event, possible downtime, reputational harm, potential loss of intellectual property or sensitive data, etc.

Determine the risk probability. Risk-based vulnerability management uses historical data and current attack exploits to determine the likelihood of every vulnerability.

Determine the severity of the risk. We calculate risk severity by multiplying the risk probability by its financial cost. The result is an indication of the threat’s magnitude.

Final Thoughts on How to Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

So how can I implement risk-based management? We hope you now have your answer. Use this guide to help you navigate the process of implementing one and eliminating potential threats to your organization’s environment.