If you are a security practitioner, then you may have noticed that much of the security industry exists because of vulnerabilities. Regardless of what job position you occupy, vulnerabilities are oftentimes the reason why you wake up every morning and ultimately engage infosec from within your cutting-edge working environment.

Vulnerabilities will continue to arise; this is a fact of the environmental change that goes with any business or organization. Security professionals need to be prepared to address these flaws. Overall, they will be much better prepared if they set up one of the top three CIS security controls to combat those vulnerabilities.

We are specifically talking about setting up a vulnerability management (VM) program. A VM program is a holistic process performed by either IT security teams or security service providers with the goal of eliminating vulnerabilities that pose serious risk to the organization. It’s a program that consists of the following six steps:

  1. Discovering vulnerabilities on an automated basis.
  2. Prioritizing the assets of the business.
  3. Assessing the risks on those assets.
  4. Reporting vulnerabilities and describing them.
  5. Remediating the vulnerabilities by applying the suitable patches.
  6. Verifying the elimination of the threat by performing a follow-through audit.

A VM program is extremely advantageous to any business. If applied successfully, it will not only enhance enterprises’ security posture by uncovering risks and addressing them, but it will also save time and money by suppressing the likelihood of a data breach.

However, starting a vulnerability management program and expecting it to work as planned should be a goal for any security team. And why not? Their job is to lower threats and make the business more secure, after all. Yet we are here today to discuss four challenges that prevent security teams from completing this objective and see what solutions organizations can use (Read more...)