Vulnerability Remediation: How To Plan And Automate Your Process
There are 8 best practices when planning your vulnerability remediation including prioritization of vulnerabilities, setting timelines, defining a SLO, developing a remediation policy, automating your vulnerability management processes, adopting continuous remediation, deploying compensating controls, and building a vulnerability management program.
In this article, you will learn more about:
Cyber attacks are quickly increasing every year. While some attacks require sophisticated knowledge of networking or well-funded campaigns, the vast majority are carried out in the simplest of ways. How?
There are several reasons:
But what’s particularly helpful to those looking to steal or do harm is the overwhelming number of vulnerabilities available for exploitation.
With billions of dollars lost annually to threat actors, who continually gain access to an organization’s weak point, regulators and businesses are seeing the importance of addressing and repairing vulnerabilities.
Companies, especially SMBs, are being required by clients to prove security best practices are being followed.
However, many take an ad hoc or relaxed approach to their vulnerability management and remediation requirements.
Scanning and patching on a monthly basis may sound sufficient, but new vulnerabilities appear daily.
This means that a monthly scan and patch cycle can equal to 29 days of potential risk exposure.
This is not a best practice.
In this article, we will lay out a template for a vulnerability remediation plan your organization can follow that will streamline processes, lower costs, and immediately mitigate risk.
What Is Vulnerability Remediation?
Vulnerability remediation is a process of eliminating detected weaknesses in your network. This process includes the discovery, prioritization, remediation, and monitoring of a vulnerability to ensure a successful long-term fix.
It’s also one of the many benefits of vulnerability management that delivers an actionable outcome for enhanced security.
What Tools Are Required?
Before getting started on the vulnerability remediation process it’s important to understand the technology used to repair systems. Determining the software and other tools you use can impact how you roll out and manage vulnerability remediation.
A defensive security engineer on a blue team might use several tools to scan, analyze, and patch vulnerabilities to complete their remediation tasks.
Nessus may be used to scan and identify exposures during a vulnerability assessment, whereas Vulcan could be leveraged for vulnerability prioritization and asset management.
With Rapid7, a security engineer could test with changes to the code and re-run to see whether the fix works.
Once you’ve decided on the right vulnerability remediation tool for your needs, the next important build to your arsenal is managing an effective team.
Managing The Remediation Team
Managing a vulnerability remediation team requires a multilevel effort with a clear set of roles and responsibilities.
Without the correct roles and organizational structure defined for your organization, a vulnerability remediation plan will not have the support to achieve its goals.
The C-Suite
Starting at the top includes the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Chief Information Security Officer, (CISO).
These roles are charged with delivering a security outcome for the business and reporting results to senior leadership and stakeholders. These roles are focused on long-term strategy and securing funding for their programs.
The Security Manager
Operationally, a vulnerability remediation team relies on a Security Manager to assign and drive the rest of the team in reaching its objectives.
Depending on the size of the organization and the maturity of the program, a Security Architect will build a design for the process and development of the project.
领英推荐
The Security Architect
Sometimes the Security Architect will report to the Security Manager, but in many cases, both the Security Architect and Security Manager will report to the Senior Manager or Security Program Director.
The Security Engineers & Analysts
The team members deploying the tasks determined by management (the “hands on keyboard”) are the security engineers, responsible for scanner configuration and other technical aspects, and security analysts, who monitor and report on vulnerabilities within the context of the organization’s asset management.
Together, the duties of the engineer and analyst will result in the delivery of a vulnerability remediation report.
These roles commonly report to a team lead, who then reports to the Security Manager, but it’s common for security engineers and analysts to report directly to the Security Manager, especially within small organizations.
The Vulnerability Remediation Process Explained
Now that you have identified which tools to use and how to organize your team, we can now begin to address what is involved in the remediation of a vulnerability.
The vulnerability remediation process is broken down into 4 key steps:
Step 1: Find
The most straightforward way to find a vulnerability is to scan your network and conduct a vulnerability assessment.
These will help to discover misconfigurations or coding flaws that can be used to compromise or exploit an application or system.
With these vulnerabilities now known, you can move on to the next step.
Step 2: Prioritize
Not every vulnerability is the same, meaning not every vulnerability requires the same treatment.
The most critical vulnerabilities could include ones that are backlogged, not just newly discovered ones.
To map out the severity levels facing your organization you can assign a risk scoring card or matrix to prioritize which vulnerabilities to remediate.
Step 3: Fix
Once you have prioritized your vulnerabilities you can begin addressing the ones at the top of your list.
By implementing a patch management procedure, your security infrastructure or engineering team will repair and test each vulnerability at a time.
These could be short-term or long-term fixes.
Step 4: Monitor
To ensure the reliability of patches and to keep updated on any irregularities or changes to the vulnerability, it’s important to maintain continuous monitoring.
This step can be done either manually with the aid of a security analyst, or more commonly now with the use of automated tools.
These steps are an ongoing process designed to organize and continually strengthen your cyber defense.
Remember, the bad guys don’t sleep, and neither should your security monitoring.
We help enterprises with 360 cybersecurity services.
Follow PurpleSec for more vulnerability management and penetration testing content.