Typically, there are a lot of vulnerabilities in a network and patching and remediating them is a never-ending process. But there’s always the question, “What should I remediate first? What if another open vulnerability gets exploited by an attacker before I get to it?” So, how can you save yourself from the resentment and remorse of thinking, “I wish I had fixed that vulnerability first so that I could prevent the attack.” With growing vulnerabilities, exploits and ransomware attacks, your vulnerability remediation process needs to be more strategic and with a goal of remediating the severe risks first to prevent common attacks.

What is Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management tools report thousands of vulnerabilities at once. But not all of them carry the same amount of risk. Your assessment efforts should focus on measuring each vulnerability’s risk levels and remediating those with higher risks first. When the severe risks are out of the way, your environment’s risk posture is reduced to a great extent.

Risk-based vulnerability management is a strategic process to assess the exact risk levels of vulnerabilities, prioritize them based on calculated risk levels and remediate higher risks more quickly to reduce the probability of an exploit.

Risk-based vulnerability management tools automatically calculate and assess the potential risk by combining multiple factors. These factors include threat intelligence feeds, exploitability, public risk ratings, number of assets in the company, current exploit activities, etc.

Why Does Your Organization Need it Now?

• Complex Interconnected Modern Networks

Thousands and thousands of workstations, servers, switches, OT and IoT devices make up a modern network. With so many complex interconnections, the size of a network exponentially increases and, consequently, the attack surface rapidly increases.

• Evolving Security Risks Beyond Software Vulnerabilities

Modern security risks are no longer just software vulnerabilities. Misconfigurations, posture anomalies, asset exposures and missing patches are all causes of cyberattacks, and evolving cybersecurity risks must be addressed immediately and effectively.

• Higher and Faster Exploitation by Attackers

A modern attack surface is much more vulnerable to cyberattacks, and attackers are getting smarter. With advanced tools, these threat actors try to take advantage of zero-day exploits as soon as possible before the world can react to them.

So, How Does Risk-Based VM Make Security Easy?

• Faster Attack Surface Reduction

Critical vulnerabilities increase your attack surface exponentially, so fixing them first reduces the attack surface exponentially, too. Risk-based vulnerability management tools help choose the higher risks first, allowing you to fix them to reduce attack surface faster and fix issues that matter.

• Efficient Resource Usage

High-critical risks should be fixed first, and risk-based vulnerability management tools allow your organization to laser-focus the resources and fix the dangerous ones first. Instead of trying to fix everything at once, you can prioritize resources according to the criticality.

• Better Adherence to Compliance

Many organizations must comply with regulatory mandates like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC2, etc. Risk-based vulnerability management helps organizations improve the process of fixing flaws, which translates to easier and better compliance with these regulations.

• Improved Decision Making

Risk-based vulnerability management is a data-driven process of prioritization, and data allows you to make intelligent decisions on resource management and which flaw to prioritize first.

Conclusion

Securing your organization’s network is a lengthy and laborious process that isn’t easy, but risk-based vulnerability management helps make the entire process much faster, easier and better. From improving your security team’s efficiency to achieving compliance, this strategy goes a long way in making security easy. But, more importantly, it helps you prevent cyberattacks instead of reacting to them.