What is Vulnerability Management?

Update Date: 01.09.2023

According to Verizon's 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, exploited vulnerabilities account for up to 7% of breaches this year, more than double the amount from last year.

When businesses are unprepared to deal with this rising issue, tragedy may strike. Once a vulnerable system has been abused, there is an increased danger of data loss, stolen credentials, or your data being held hostage for a costly ransom.

This exploitation and loss may have serious ramifications for the firm as a whole, affecting financial, legal, reputational, and other elements.

Many firms have pursued tougher, more proactive techniques for addressing vulnerabilities in their environments as a result of massive breaches. However, as corporate infrastructures have become more complex, encompassing the cloud and covering enormous attack surfaces, companies have found it increasingly difficult to get total insight into the fast-spreading vulnerabilities throughout their ecosystems. Cybercriminals have learned how to exploit chains of flaws in systems, apps, and people to capitalize on the chance.

Vulnerability management programs handle today's current cybersecurity concerns by implementing a thorough and ongoing process for finding, categorizing, remediating, and mitigating vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.

In this article, we will explain what vulnerability management is, why organizations need a vulnerability management program, and how they can implement it. We will also discuss the best practices of vulnerability management programs and the differences between vulnerability management and other similar concepts like risk-based vulnerability management, patch management, and vulnerability assessment.

What is the Meaning of Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management is the continuous, routine process of finding, analyzing, reporting, managing, and remediating cyber threats, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations across systems, endpoints, and workloads. Vulnerability management includes validating the urgency and impact of each vulnerability based on a variety of risk factors and responding quickly to the most pressing threats. Vulnerability management, along with other security measures, is essential for organizations to prioritize potential threats and reduce their "attack surface". Typically, a security team will use a vulnerability management tool to identify vulnerabilities and use various patching or remediation techniques.

The vulnerability management program aims to provide controls and procedures that will assist you in identifying vulnerabilities in your organization's technological infrastructure and information system components.

Vulnerability management is a recognized best practice for protecting organizations against cyber attacks and critical corporate data. As a result, creating a thorough vulnerability management strategy is the beginning point for a successful program that assists you in improving your organization's cybersecurity.

A robust vulnerability management program employs threat intelligence and expertise in IT and business processes to swiftly prioritize risks and remediate vulnerabilities saving teams time and money.

Why Do We Need Vulnerability Management?

In 2021, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) identified 18,378 vulnerabilities. While there were more "low" and "medium" vulnerabilities revealed last year, the overall number has continued to rise, which should because worry about organizations. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, ransomware has increased by 600%, resulting in an assault on an organization every 11 seconds.

According to the MIT Technology Review's 2021 Report, vulnerabilities for weak systems may cost hackers $1 million or more to offer to threat actors looking to destroy an enterprise. This has placed an enormous load on enterprises since they must give continual reporting on vulnerabilities and apply updates to control them.

Vulnerability management systems provide businesses with a framework for addressing these risks on a large scale, discovering weaknesses across the whole environment more quickly. Meanwhile, analytics assist firms in continuously optimizing the repair approaches they use. Businesses that have a solid vulnerability management program in place better handle the risks they face not just now, but also in the future. Other reasons to implement a vulnerability management program are as follows:

• Regulatory and Compliance Requirements: A structured vulnerability management program assists in meeting regulatory obligations. This is accomplished by examining and executing compliance requirements from multiple frameworks, such as the Payment Card Industry (PCI) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

  PCI contains some compliance that span from the broad to the detailed, such as "submit a patch audit report" and "install patches on systems for both internal and external applications only after testing them in separate test environments".

  To satisfy HIPAA compliance, a healthcare business must have a solid set of patch management policies and processes in place. This covers inventory management, testing, documentation, and setups for automated software upgrades, unmanaged hosts, firmware, and other items.

• Reduced Backlogs: It is just as critical to plan for the destruction of old vulnerabilities as it is to fix new ones. Every company does not run in the same manner or have the same assets or users. As a result, many vulnerabilities that provide a higher risk to one company don't pose the same amount of danger to another. Instead of fixing all newly reported high-level vulnerabilities, an organization should prioritize the vulnerabilities that have the greatest effect on its operations. This includes addressing a backlog of previously discovered vulnerabilities that the business has neglected to resolve.

  Developing a vulnerability scanning strategy assists in addressing the backlog of current vulnerabilities. The policy should specify how to prioritize vulnerabilities depending on severity level, set periods for remediation, minimize false positives, and manage exceptions. Based on the prioritized suggestions, a patching strategy is created to decrease the backlog of susceptible systems.

In a summary, a vulnerability management program's objective is to maintain your network secure from known exploits and compliance with all applicable regulations. It does this by examining your network for incompatibilities, missing upgrades, and common software vulnerabilities. It then prioritizes the correction of any identified vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management software protects your corporate network against known vulnerabilities, making it far more difficult for thieves to attack your organization. In addition, it shields your firm against fines related to regulatory noncompliance, saving you money and preserving your company's brand.

Do SMBs Need a Vulnerability Management Program?

Yes. Exploited vulnerabilities hurt any size or kind of organization. This is why corporate and small company vulnerability management objectives both attempt to protect their organizations from risk. The most efficient method to achieve this aim is to build a program for proper planning and remediating vulnerabilities. However, businesses of all sizes often disagree on how to prioritize this purpose.

A small firm may be focused on quick expansion, allocating the majority of its resources to marketing or technical teams while ignoring fundamental vulnerability management and other security procedures. A major organization, on the other hand, may already be a market driver with the need for increased security to safeguard its assets.

Both recognize the need for vulnerability management, but the capacity to achieve the necessary degree of security is a significant reason why so many SMBs are victims of cyber-attacks. According to a survey, 43% of cyberattacks target small firms, yet only 14% of them are equipped to protect themselves.

Many small and medium-sized businesses prefer to outsource their vulnerability management program to a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP). MSSPs provide SMBs with the following advantages:

• Lower cost than employing in-house

• Seeking advice from security specialists to assist in the development of their cybersecurity program

• Inadequate resources to adequately run and sustain the program

In the face of escalating cybercrime threats, triage complications, compliance requirements, and managing multiple organizational structures, a vulnerability management program assists in carefully addressing vulnerabilities and reducing risk, resulting in long-term organizational advantages.

What are the Advantages of a Vulnerability Management Program?

Vulnerability management has several advantages. The primary advantage of a vulnerability management program is adhering to legal regulations and improving operational efficiency in risk management inside the firm. This improves visibility and understanding of which systems are most vulnerable if hacked. Other advantages of adopting an enterprise vulnerability management program are as follows:

• Proactive Risk management

• Scheduled/automated scanning

• Agile remediation

• Prioritization of business systems

• Detailed reporting

How Do You Implement Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management programs should be proactive and continuous. Regular usage guarantees that your vulnerability management solutions are always up-to-date with the most recent fixes and help you combat data breaches.

Numerous steps in the vulnerability management process should be adhered to by vulnerability management programs. Even though there are several methods to characterize each step of the vulnerability management cycle, the overall procedure remains the same.

Before the process, Gartner's Vulnerability Management Guidance Framework outlines five "pre-work" steps:

1. Determine the Scope of the Program

2. Define Roles and Responsibilities

3. Select Vulnerability Assessment tools

4. Create and Refine Policy and SLAs

5. Identify Asset Context Sources

This pre-work phase evaluates and analyses existing resources, procedures, and tools to identify gaps. During the pre-work phase, a security expert should ask the following questions to assist identify the scope of your program:

• Who will oversee this program? What are their jobs and responsibilities?

• Which assets or hosts are the most important to protect?

• Which assets will be evaluated for weaknesses?

• What tools or software do we need to administer or scan our hosts efficiently?

• How often should we evaluate our assets for vulnerabilities?

• When a vulnerability is discovered, how long do we have to fix it?

• What rules and service level agreements (SLAs) must be specified?

• What is the context of the assets we desire to manage?

The primary stages of a vulnerability management process cycle will be explained in the next section.

What are the 5 Steps of Vulnerability Management?

The Vulnerability Management Lifecycle consists of the following five phases:

1. Assess: Assessment is the first phase in the cycle. In this phase, security analysts should identify and narrow down the assets to be evaluated for vulnerabilities. Typically, vulnerabilities are rated using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The assessment stage has two main steps:
   • Identify Assets
   • Scan for Vulnerabilities

The next stage is to examine each asset for vulnerabilities and provide a report detailing which assets are at risk and need patching, additional investigation, or remediation.

Two prominent methods for completing a vulnerability assessment are as follows:

• Network-based Solution: With a conventional, network-based solution, all endpoints must be on the network, and a vulnerability assessment tool queries and scans the devices on the network. Challenges connected with network-based scanning include restricted visibility and access limitations. If a resource is not linked to the network, the security analyst cannot determine what is at risk. Moreover, with outdated, network-based technologies, credentials are often necessary for complete visibility. Managing the degree of credentials required to run a successful vulnerability assessment is layered and difficult for many businesses, which leads to an incomplete picture of which assets are secure and which are not. In addition, with a conventional vulnerability solution, hundreds or thousands of plug-ins are often added to the tool, none of which are compatible with the organization's current software. This lengthens the time required to scan a host and renders the environment inoperable.
• Sensor/agent: A sensor must be put on each asset to conduct an agent-based evaluation. Currently, the majority of agent-based vulnerability scanners need the installation of cumbersome agents. These agents are generally so massive that they impose a substantial burden on an endpoint, slowing down, crashing, or otherwise impeding system scans.

Due to the high-performance effect of legacy network and agent-based scanning technologies, it is sometimes essential to scan just a piece of the environment at a time, hence delaying the evaluation process. By proceeding cautiously or segmenting systems, security teams may prevent connection failures and system breakdowns. However, this hinders the objective of promptly detecting and fixing vulnerabilities on all relevant hosts.

After scanning, these outdated systems generate a report, which is a big, cumbersome document that analysts must read through to identify the appropriate areas for repair. Again, timeliness is a difficulty for this sort of scan and its reporting technique. The moment a report is created, it becomes obsolete. Then, new vulnerabilities might lie undiscovered for months or longer.

Modern vulnerability management solutions run constantly owing to cloud technologies and lightweight agent architecture. It is a scanless solution that enables a vulnerability management team to view a range of vulnerabilities quickly since the data is stored in the cloud and is thus constantly accessible. Due to the availability of data in real-time, scanning is an ongoing, continuous activity rather than a one-time event.

With this asset discovery, a company simply determines which devices and components are secured and how system endpoints may be accessed. This phase is essential because it helps identify the attack surface that is exposed or exploitable. In addition, the information obtained by the vulnerability management solution is utilized to generate reports and system metrics for the subsequent vulnerability management process step.

2. Prioritize: Once you have determined which assets and systems are possibly vulnerable or weakened, the actual job may begin. In the Prioritize stage of the cycle, the vulnerability management team determines the next stage's activities via three phases:

   • Assign value. Here is when your preparatory work becomes useful. Since you have previously determined which assets are crucial, it should be reasonably simple to assign research priorities to each asset. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a free and open standard for communicating the severity of vulnerabilities. It delivers a score between 0.0 and 10.0. As shown in the chart below, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) contains a severity rating for the CVSS scores to supplement the vulnerability assessment.

   CVSS Score	Severity Rating
   0.0	None
   0.1 - 3.9	Low
   4.0 - 6.9	Medium
   7.0 - 8.9	High
   9.0 - 10.0	Critical
   Table 1. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Rating

   • Using the ranked list of assets, you must assess the threat exposure of each asset. This necessitates analysis and research to identify the amount of danger associated with each entity.
   • Include threat context in the report. Communication with your larger security operations team and the use of a robust range of endpoint security technologies are vital. A thorough dive into threat intelligence (both internally acquired and from third-party sources) significantly alters the evaluated and prioritized degree of risk.

While vulnerability scanners and CVSS scores are useful tools, they don't always give a complete picture of the threats a company faces.

Due to the unique risk profile of your firm, these generic rating ratings don't always give the greatest insight into the challenges it confronts. Although intelligent vulnerability management technologies can prioritize risk, they are not always able to comprehend other aspects.

Using the collected inventory of threat intelligence, cybersecurity specialists give a more comprehensive context of your risk exposure. In determining a reasonable risk assessment, these security specialists often analyze a variety of elements, such as the following:

• How difficult would it be to exploit the vulnerability?
• Is this a genuine vulnerability or a false alarm?
• How easily might this vulnerability be exploited?
• Can this vulnerability be remotely exploited?
• How many devices have been reported as being vulnerable?
• Are exploits for this vulnerability publicly available?
• What is the effect on the whole company if the vulnerability is successfully exploited?
• Is this a new vulnerability, and do you know how long it has been on your network?
• Exist in your infrastructure security rules, procedures, and controls to limit the effect of the vulnerability if it is exploited?

3. Act: Vulnerability management teams take one of the following actions after data is collected during the prioritizing phase:
   • Remediate: They fully eliminate the vulnerability. This is the best choice if the vulnerability poses a high risk and/or affects a crucial system or asset in their business. Before the asset becomes a potential entry point for an attack, it should be patched or upgraded.

Patching often addresses the majority of software vulnerabilities. In reality, unpatched software is the leading cause of cybersecurity breaches. Therefore, it is essential to have a patch management system that ensures operating systems and third-party applications are current. There are instances when a vendor has not yet provided a fix for a specific vulnerability. In this situation, companies should implement mitigating measures to reduce the potential effect of the vulnerability's exploitation.

• Mitigate: They either mitigate the vulnerability or devise a method or approach that makes it difficult or impossible for an attacker to exploit it. This does not eliminate the vulnerability, but the rules and safeguards they implement keep their systems secure. Depending on their severity, mitigation steps include restricting user rights for certain activities or deleting or blacklisting the affected devices from the network.
• Accept Risk: Acceptance is also a contradictory method for managing vulnerability. This entails taking no action in response to identified vulnerabilities. With low-risk vulnerabilities that offer limited dangers to the organization, this method makes sense. Especially when the expense of correcting the vulnerability outweighs the potential cost of exploiting it.

4. Reassess: After prioritizing your list of vulnerabilities and assigning actions depending on the amount of exposure, it is time to reevaluate and verify your work. A reassessment will reveal if the activities you've decided upon have been effective and whether there are new concerns around the same assets, enabling you to confirm your work, remove those issues from your list, and add new ones as necessary. The reassessment phase is also important for communicating to senior management the metrics of your team's continuing efforts.

5. Improve: This phase concludes the vulnerability management cycle. The prioritization stage has three main steps:

   • Evaluate Metrics
   • Eliminate Underlying Issues
   • Evolve Processes and SLAs

The most effective vulnerability management systems strive for continuous development by shoring up weak defenses, eliminating underlying problems, reevaluating the pre-work phase, and reviewing the initial pre-work questions. By routinely analyzing the full vulnerability lifecycle and seeking methods to adapt and improve, you protect proactively against any flaw an attacker may exploit to endanger your business.

Documenting not just the reported vulnerabilities, but also a security strategy on how to disclose known vulnerabilities and monitor suspicious activities is essential. These reports are crucial because they help firms improve their security responses in the future by leaving records. These reports should also be shared with senior management and used for compliance checks. This is because showing and documenting resolved vulnerabilities and problems demonstrates responsibility. Moreover, accountability is often necessary to maintain compliance requirements. Fortunately, intelligent and sophisticated vulnerability management technologies can create these reports automatically, so you do not have to do it manually.

Figure 1. 5 Steps of Vulnerability Management

Which Teams Must Be Involved in Program Development?

Executive leadership support is essential for a successful vulnerability management program. Executive leadership sets program policies, addresses financial problems, and offers leadership for other parts of the organization that support the program.

A multi-team endeavor develops a coordinated effort, requiring vigilance, to correctly install a vulnerability management program. Although the tool or service is typically managed by one team, additional IT and non-IT teams, such as legal, finance, and business partners, are engaged. Having the cooperation of these other teams provides due diligence into how resolving vulnerabilities may affect other integrated technologies, compliance, budget, users, and other factors.

When a program contains potentially wide-ranging risk elements, it's always a good idea to incorporate more than less without engaging the whole company. To be efficient and cost-effective, every comprehensive cybersecurity plan must include this function.

What are the Best Practices for a Vulnerability Management Program?

Vulnerability management is a constant process that must be followed to detect, categorize, address, and mitigate vulnerabilities in any organization. Organizations who take a proactive and preventative approach to the security of their apps, devices, and networks include effective threat and vulnerability management technologies into their stack and are substantially less vulnerable to cyber attacks and data breaches. However, in today's digital world, organizations must adhere to certain industry-best practices, as listed below, to stay up with new systems added to networks, updates to systems, or the appearance of new classes of vulnerabilities. By using these best practices, you may improve your company's security and make the most of your vulnerability management program.

• Conduct frequent vulnerability scans: The period between vulnerability scans influences threat management efficiency. Adopting a culture of regular scanning of your infrastructure helps bridge the gap that might leave your ecosystem susceptible to new vulnerabilities at a time when attackers are continually upgrading their techniques. Scanning your devices on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis is an excellent method to keep on top of system flaws and provide value to your organization. The frequency of vulnerability scanning needed in any network is determined by network design, device effect on the network, and other considerations.

• Examine all devices and endpoints in your IT ecosystem: It is critical to scan all devices and access points that interact with the system in order to minimize vulnerabilities throughout the whole company network. Firms may obtain useful insights into the potential flaws in their architecture by scanning all assets within the ecosystem and assisting them in creating the appropriate repair, mitigation, or acceptance methods depending on the severity of the risks. Furthermore, generating an inventory list that contains all the network's devices and endpoints as well as their roles might assist you in prioritizing the targets to be included in the vulnerability scanning process.

• Keep a record of all scans and their outcomes: Another critical aspect of any vulnerability management strategy is to plan each scan according to a management-approved timetable, with required audit reports covering the scan findings. Organizations readily monitor trends and problem recurrences in their ecosystem by adopting adequate documentation of the frequency of security scans and their findings, allowing them to detect vulnerable systems and increase responsibility. Furthermore, always ensure that the reports are written in such a manner that they are understood not just by the technically aware business teams, but also by the company's non-technical management and senior employees.

• Provide appropriate security training to IT teams to maintain continuous security assessments: To guarantee effective vulnerability management, IT staff must be sensitized to include ongoing security assessments in their build-deploy cycles via frequent training sessions. After the assessment schedules are determined, the effectiveness of the vulnerability management program is dependent on the IT team's ability to maintain all relevant assets available and configured. Furthermore, once detected, it is the responsibility of the IT staff to mitigate, patch, or fix the asset vulnerabilities. As a result, offering sufficient training to IT personnel in safe baselines and coding rules will help them fix vulnerabilities quicker.

• Keep security baselines up to date and relate them to compliance needs: By incorporating safe baselines or criteria for conducting assessments into vulnerability management policies, organizations significantly enhance their overall IT security strategy. Furthermore, these baselines must be defined for various asset categories and classified as required, important, and optional criteria. Along with this, you must verify that the baselines you build are linked to your company's compliance standards. For example, if you operate an online store, you must map your baseline metrics to satisfy PCI DSS compliance in credit card data processing. As a result, enterprises better adhere to security baselines and requirements while remaining compatible with global norms.

• Delegate ownership of vital assets: Another best practice that companies use to promote the success of their vulnerability management programs is to assign owners to each of their key assets. Furthermore, appointing asset owners who are accountable for maintaining those specific assets patched and who suffer the most when those assets are hacked may be an effective technique for keeping your system safe and secure. When allocating asset ownership, be sure to include both technical and business individuals on the list so that your teams are prepared to deal with any kind of danger.

• Ensure that patching procedures and security assessments are prioritized depending on risk: Following the enrollment and assignment of all IT assets, security evaluations and patching activities are allocated depending on the risks. Prioritization enables IT, teams, to concentrate on patching the assets that offer the most risk to the enterprise, such as fixing found vulnerabilities in all internet-facing or connected devices in the system. Similarly, using both automatic and human assessments on assets helps you prioritize the frequency and scope of assessments needed based on a risk value assigned to each of them. A high-risk asset, for example, is allocated a comprehensive evaluation as well as manual expert security testing, while a low-risk asset merely requires a generic vulnerability scan.

• Define, measure, and assess program metrics: After registering and reviewing all of an organization's IT assets, the following step is to guarantee that the vulnerability management process is efficient and on schedule. You must set aside regularly to design, evaluate, and assess the main metrics of your vulnerability management policy to determine if current vulnerabilities are being addressed or risks are being handled with time. To have a better understanding of the current security concerns impacting their IT assets, thought leaders examine the time it takes to acquire new assets or go live for essential business applications. This information is then used to fine-tune vulnerability management systems, promote quality training, and improve IT security standards.

• Ensure that the vulnerability management program has centralized visibility: Next, providing your company's stakeholders, IT workers, employees, and senior management, with a unified perspective of the current state of the vulnerability management policy helps you go a long way in enterprise security. You do this by implementing a centralized dashboard that provides full, real-time information regarding the asset assessment schedule, major vulnerabilities that need quick correction, or departments with the largest or lowest number of susceptible assets. Adopting this tried-and-true best practice may provide critical insights that can boost the effectiveness of your security systems.

• Implement mitigation tracking as part of your vulnerability management program: Finally, developing a tool, such as an MIS system, to monitor mitigation techniques against vulnerability classes and asset kinds is quite beneficial. This system assists you in determining patching progress, as well as offering information on how to patch various kinds of vulnerabilities and the time necessary for patching. In addition, delegating mitigation/remediation activities to particular teams and incorporating a monitoring system such as bug-tracking may be critical determinants in increasing the success rate of a vulnerability management program.

How to Choose a Vulnerability Management Solution?

The main duty of a vulnerability manager is to control exposure to known vulnerabilities. A high-quality vulnerability tool or tool set significantly enhances the deployment and continuing effectiveness of a vulnerability management program, even though vulnerability management entails more than running a scanning tool.

There are several alternatives and solutions on the market, each claiming to provide superior attributes. Consider the following factors while assessing a vulnerability management solution:

• The performance effect on an endpoint is crucial: Increasing numbers of vulnerability scanning providers claim that they provide agent-based solutions. Unfortunately, the majority of these agents are so cumbersome that they negatively influence the performance of endpoints. Therefore, while looking for an agent-based solution, seek one with a lightweight agent, one that takes very little space on an endpoint to reduce the productivity impact.

• Timeliness is crucial: If a vulnerability management technology fails to find vulnerabilities in a timely way, it is ineffective and does not contribute to overall security. This is often when network-based scanners fail. It may take a long time to perform a scan and use a significant amount of your organization's precious bandwidth, only to provide information that is soon obsolete. A solution that depends on a lightweight agent is preferable to one that relies on a network.

• Less is more: Organizations no longer need a complex collection of security technologies and solutions that require expert employees. Many organizations increasingly depend on an integrated platform that incorporates vulnerability management solutions in addition to other security tools for cyber hygiene, endpoint detection and response(EDR), device control, and more, eventually defending the enterprise from attacks on unprotected systems.

• Comprehensive, real-time visibility is essential: You should be able to recognize immediately what is susceptible. Legacy vulnerability solutions impede visibility, network scans take a long time and provide outdated data, large agents impede business productivity, and cumbersome reports offer nothing to aid in the prompt resolution of vulnerabilities. Scanless technologies enable your team to see and interact with data in real-time. A single, interactive dashboard with search and filtering capabilities enables you to eliminate potentially critical security breaches in your business instantly. Because it is a solution that does not need periodic scanning, it is always active and continuously searches for and identifies vulnerabilities.

What is the Difference Between Vulnerability Assessment and Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management is distinct from the vulnerability assessment. The most important difference between them is that vulnerability assessment is a one-time analysis of a host or network, whereas vulnerability management is a continuous procedure. While A vulnerability assessment is a one-time activity with a defined beginning and end date vulnerability management is a "process" that comprises continual vulnerability assessments that are performed at regular time intervals, and in certain circumstances, the period is "continuous" in the sense that an assessment is immediately repeated once it is done. The idea behind vulnerability management is that evaluations are repeated to determine what has changed since the prior assessment. We do this to track progress and risk on an ongoing basis to keep risk at the level agreed upon by the organization's security policy.

Another difference is vulnerability management process includes vulnerability assessment, but not vice versa. A vulnerability assessment is merely the first step in managing vulnerabilities. Simply said, a vulnerability assessment provides a snapshot of your IT infrastructure's current state, while vulnerability management provides continually developing, real-time information, remedial recommendations, and reporting.

What is the Difference Between Vulnerability Management and Risk-based Vulnerability Management?

Risk-based vulnerability management is a cybersecurity strategy that identifies and mitigates the vulnerabilities that present the most risk to a business. Risk-based vulnerability management is one method of assisting these teams in identifying and resolving those vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited and adversely affect the company.

To comprehend the distinction between risk-based vulnerability management and legacy vulnerability management, it is necessary to define the following terms.

• Vulnerability: The International Organization for Standardization defines vulnerability as "a weakness of an asset or collection of assets that may be exploited by one or more threats".

• Threat: A threat is an entity capable of exploiting a vulnerability.

• Risk: Risk is the consequence of a threat exploiting a vulnerability.

Both risk-based vulnerability management systems and legacy vulnerability management technologies are capable of recognizing environmental threats. However, risk vulnerability management reveals a far more effective prioritization of the organization's most urgent and significant concerns. The following are essential components of risk-based vulnerability management:

• Automation: Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and other intelligent automation solutions automate risk assessment procedures to expedite activity and maximize resources.

• Comprehensive Risk Scores: Risk is analyzed and computed based on asset criticality, risk severity, attack likelihood, business effect, and other significant variables.

• Integrated Threat Intelligence: Integrated threat intelligence is the collection, processing, and analysis of data to better comprehend a threat actor's motivations, targets, and attack tactics.

What is the Difference Between Vulnerability Management and Patch Management?

Patch Management Program is another common name for the Vulnerability Management Program. Although linked, their purposes are distinct. A vulnerability management program is a continuous procedure for identifying, researching, and mitigating network vulnerabilities. It utilizes IT, cyber threat intelligence, legal, and finance departments, among others, to support its continual vulnerability remediation objectives. This sort of program participates in numerous projects and manages other programs concurrently, such as a patch management program.

A patch management software facilitates the work required to apply fixes to a system to eliminate identified vulnerabilities. We most usually equate vulnerability management with the work performed by a security team. A program centered on patching facilitates a methodical and responsible approach to the correction of vulnerabilities.

What Does a Vulnerability Management Specialist Do?

The vulnerability management specialist position is in charge of risk assessment, threat modeling, and deep technical understanding of projects and technological products. This position collaborates closely with the CISO and the Director of Threat and Vulnerability Management to discover, assess, and prioritize possible vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure using both human and automated approaches. The primary responsibilities of a vulnerability management specialist are as follows:

• Serve as the threat and vulnerability platform and metrics reporting subject-matter expert.

• Develop a roadmap for threat and vulnerability management services.

• Provide key stakeholders with an in-depth study of vulnerabilities and repercussions.

• Conduct key vulnerability detection and response drills.

• Early notification of important vulnerabilities and exposures related to the protection of the company's information assets

• Influence stakeholders to prioritize and carry out risk management efforts, as well as to push the closure of process and technological gaps.

Must-have qualifications of a vulnerability management specialist are given below:

• Bachelor's degree

• Action-oriented and results-oriented

• Capability to convey concerns to top technology leaders and offer remedies (CISO, CTO)

• Skills in decision-making and prioritizing

• Expertise in protecting basic networking protocols such as DNS, HTTP, TCP, UDP, TLS, IPsec, 802.1x, and NFS

• Expertise and expertise in the operating system and network infrastructure security

• Fundamentals of encryption

• Knowledge of risk modeling principles and frameworks

• Experience with ethical hacking and network penetration testing

• Extensive experience developing, maintaining, and supporting a vulnerability management platform (e.g. Qualys, Nexpose, Nessus, Retina)

• Experience with vulnerability assessment processes and tools such as OWASP, Metasploit, Nmap, Nessus, and Burp Suite.

• Strong knowledge about the attacker's kill chain

• Understanding of typical exploitation methods and mitigating measures

• Excellent documentation abilities