How To Reduce Your Mean Time To Patch A Vulnerability
You can reduce the average time to patch vulnerabilities by implementing a continuous and automated vulnerability management solution. This drastically cuts down on the time required to prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities while enabling your security or IT teams to focus on more valuable projects.
In This Article You'll Learn:
Many organizations struggle with aggregating the results from their vulnerability scanner and correlating this data into useful metrics that can help drive their patching and remediation process.
Based on publicly available statistics for data breaches over the last decade, failure to patch vulnerable systems in a timely manner can potentially result in loss of revenue, damage to an organization’s brand, and in some cases complete shutdown of the business.
In this article, we will explore in detail the factors that determine the average time to patch and review how PurpleSec’s vulnerability management solution can help reduce the average time to patch your vulnerabilities.
Let’s now discuss the issue in more detail by understanding the ‘time to patch’ problem, and by defining a few terms related to the metrics associated with vulnerability remediation and patching times.
What Is Considered An Average Time To Patch A Vulnerability?
Vulnerability scanning tools basically perform the same function for enterprise and SMB environments.
You provide a list or a range of IP addresses of your network for the scanner.
The scanner runs at a specified time and produces a vulnerability report for all assets it can touch. The report breaks down what it finds in various severity levels, such as, – Critical, High, Medium, Low, and Informational.
For example, if you are a SMB with less than 5 IP addresses, with only a single Critical vulnerability, your average time to patch should be considerably lower than a larger organization that has 1,000 IP addresses with 500 Critical vulnerabilities.
A press release distributor recently published an article saying that the average number of days to patch critical vulnerabilities is 60 days.
So where do we start in understanding how these figures can help your organization reduce patching times and achieve the benefits of an effective vulnerability program?
Vulnerability Metrics Defined
Let’s first consider a few terms related to the metrics used to calculate the average patching time:
Mean Time to Patch (MTTP) – Average time it takes to patch a vulnerability. Generally calculated by subtracting the difference in time between the official release date of a patch and the time it takes to install the patch on the average of supported assets. The MTTP time should not exceed the number of days between the next maintenance period.
Median Time To Respond/Remediate (MTTR) – Measurement of time elapsed between the occurrence of a security incident, time of discovery, when it was investigated, and contained.
Median Time To Detect (MTTR) – The average length of time it takes a cybersecurity team to discover incidents in their environment.
Maintenance Window/Period – The period set aside by IT to remediate vulnerabilities within the environment. This time in most cases is pre-approved and continuous by Change Management.
We will reference these metrics throughout the remainder of the article.
Let’s now look at the contributing factors for high average patch times and why automation can help resolve the issue.
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Risks Of Not Patching Vulnerabilities
When gathered and measured properly, vulnerability metrics can help your IT teams identify areas of risk within your organization.
In this section, we will examine the dangers of not reporting key metrics and how it can potentially put your organization at risk for the next data breach.
New Vulnerabilities Are Emerging Daily
A consistent and high MTTP value will elevate the risk of exposing your critical systems to zero-day attacks.
Once hackers compromise your systems, they can harvest your data in a matter of days or even load malware onto your systems that could possibly lay dormant indefinitely.
This is dangerous and increases the risk of the software infecting other systems on the network.
Ransomware & Extortionware Remain A Top Threat
A high MTTP or MTTR metric also puts your organization at risk of becoming the next victim of ransomware or an extortionware attack.
Related Article:?How To Prevent Ransomware Attacks: An Expert Guide
End-of-life operating systems or legacy applications running on production servers are especially at risk.
If exploited, these systems can shut down production or prevent users from accessing them altogether.
Delaying Time To Patch
Delayed patching increases your MTTP which can lead to a backlog of vulnerabilities, which in turn increases technical debt.
Instead of proactively patching to reduce risk, reactive patching after the systems have been exploited is not the best practice.
By understanding the role metrics play in the patching process, your organization can determine risk and make plans to reduce the MTTP and MTTR values.
So, how can your organization go about planning and meeting the challenge of timely patching?
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