From my Gartner Blog – Considering Remediation Approaches For Vulnerability Prioritization
As Anton said, we are starting our work on vulnerability management this year. One of the points I’ve started to look at more carefully is how much the different patching approaches can affect how we prioritize vulnerabilities for remediation.
Expanding the prioritization of vulnerabilities to go beyond CVSS and include threat context is something we are seeing quickly moving to mainstream. Now it’s not uncommon to see organizations that don’t only look at how bad a vulnerability could be, but how much it is and even will be (great work on prioritization models by some vendors out there). This really helps reducing the noise and focus on what matters.
But this is helpful when you look at vulnerabilities individually only. When they move to other side of the fence, however, the problem has some different nuances. IT operations don’t see vulnerabilities, they see patches. And the relationship between patches and vulnerabilities are not always one-to-one, and not all patches are equal. There are those “applied-periodically-automatically-with-no-intervention” types of patches, there are also the “almost-never-released-and-when-installed-breaks-everything” types of patches. The IT Ops team may not even bother looking at the priority of the former but may want a very thorough justification for why they need to apply the latter.
Many vulnerability management programs, because they are managed by the security team, do not consider the characteristics of the patching process when applying their prioritization criteria. But if they want to be taken seriously by IT Ops, they should. So, my questions here are:
– When you prioritize vulnerabilities, do you incorporate “cost to patch” in your criteria?
– If you do so, how? Does your tool set allow you to do it? Where is that information coming from?
– If you define patching times by categories, have you considered patching characteristics for categorization? For example, do you define categories as something like “non-critical workstations” or like “windows workstations with auto-updates on”?
– Do you look at the vendors of software deployed in your environment as part of this exercise? Patching Microsoft vs. Oracle, for example? Do you take into consideration the quality of the patches or release schedule of the vendor to define the patching times?
We like to stay away from the patching problem as it seems more like an IT operations problem than a security problem. But I believe that proper prioritization (or at least one that will be useful for the goal of fixing vulnerabilities) should include something about the required patches too. If that’s correct, what are the tools available for that and how are organizations doing it?
Please jump in and leave your experiences in the comments section!
The post Considering Remediation Approaches For Vulnerability Prioritization appeared first on Augusto Barros.
from Augusto Barros https://gtnr.it/2VcMTAS
via IFTTT
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Security Balance authored by Augusto Barros. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SecurityBalance/~3/H_PkJiKPVkY/from-my-gartner-blog-considering.html
