Vulnerability assessments are vital to defending against cyber attacks. Attackers use exploits to steal valuable data, disrupt business functions or even take control of critical infrastructure.
Successful attacks cost companies significant money, time and labor to repair. Vulnerability assessments help prevent such breaches, saving costs and preserving an organization’s reputation.
Ensure Compliance
Whether it’s financial institutions safeguarding online banking systems, healthcare organizations protecting patient data or manufacturers ensuring the safety of industrial control systems, vulnerability assessment helps ensure compliance with regulations and best practices. It’s a powerful tool for reinforcing defenses against the many threats targeting your organization — including impersonating brands, hijacking digital assets, finding new vulnerabilities to exploit, stealing intellectual property or compromising executives.
Vulnerability assessments must be routinely conducted to help ensure that the organization is constantly on guard against modern cyberattacks. Implementing operationalized vulnerability assessment activities requires fostering cooperation between security, operations and development teams — a process known as DevSecOps.
To make this collaboration successful, vulnerability assessment tools must provide comprehensive visibility into the software landscape. This is why discovery solutions that offer a holistic view of the attack surface and facilitate strategic vulnerability assessments are essential. These solutions can help identify the presence of hidden corners that could be easily spotted by bad actors, such as rogue IT assets that lack any security controls. Then, they can help prioritize remediation efforts by analyzing an asset’s risk level and exploitation status in the wild.
Reduce Risk
The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and keeping pace with the rapid rate of changes across your IT architecture is challenging. As a result, organizations may have gaps between vulnerability assessments, which can leave them exposed to attacks and increase their attack surface.
Attackers exploit vulnerabilities to infiltrate your network, gain unauthorized access to sensitive information or launch denial of service (DoS) attacks. By reducing your attack surface through an operationalized vulnerability assessment program, you can mitigate the risk of data breaches, cyberattacks and insider threats.
Vulnerability assessment solutions that enable high-speed scanning of your entire IT environment, including cloud environments, IoT devices and OT systems, help you first find the most critical vulnerabilities. This allows you to improve remediation windows and eliminate blind spots that can leave your assets vulnerable to attack. Vulnerability assessment tools incorporating intelligence and machine learning can prioritize vulnerabilities based on their impact on your business and the help they are affecting, making it easier to focus on the most severe threats. This way, you can reduce thousands of discovered vulnerabilities to those that matter.
Enhance Security
Vulnerability assessments uncover weaknesses within your digital infrastructure, reducing the chance attackers can exploit them and gain unauthorized access to sensitive information. Organizations can prevent attacks when these weaknesses are discovered and closed, including malware infections, data breaches and network intrusions.
However, many organizations need help to manage their vulnerability assessment processes and best practices effectively. For example, they can face challenges if their tools don’t support contextual prioritization or asset criticality. These capabilities are necessary for them to spend time and effort addressing vulnerabilities that don’t pose significant risks to their business.
Moreover, they can have visibility challenges when assessing cloud environments, IoT devices and operational technology (OT). To mitigate these challenges, they must facilitate high-speed, accurate scanning of all IT systems. This includes desktops, servers and networks, IoT devices, OT assets and application containers. This is essential because it helps them identify new and existing vulnerabilities and ensure they have a clear path to remediation. Moreover, it can also help them understand their true risk posture and take the right steps to meet their compliance and security requirements.
Reduce Operational Costs
For most organizations, reducing operational costs is an important goal. A vulnerability assessment can help by enabling CISOs to prioritize risk-based remediation. This can reduce the number of vulnerabilities that must be fixed to meet business goals.
Vulnerability assessments can be automated with threat intelligence and advanced correlation tools to reduce the overall cost of vulnerability management. For example, Qualys VMDR continuously identifies critical misconfigurations and vulnerabilities on assets and then groups them according to their risk and exploitation ratings (such as exploitable, active attack, high lateral movement, etc.).
These groupings make it easy for security teams to track vulnerabilities and close gaps while addressing the most critical issues first. This approach can also make it easier for CISOs to justify budget increases or reductions to the executive team. Additionally, it can improve efficiency by encouraging development, security and operations teams to work together closely, a process called DevSecOps. This approach can speed up the time to identify and fix issues and increase visibility into progress against remediation goals.
Increase Efficiency
With a comprehensive list of vulnerabilities discovered, security teams can prioritize their efforts and develop plans to remediate them. This is typically done by leveraging multifaceted risk-based vulnerability prioritization, considering severity, current exploitation activity, business criticality and exposure.
The final step in the vulnerability assessment process involves resolving identified gaps. This can be accomplished through introducing new cybersecurity measures, procedures or tools; making changes to software, hardware and configurations; developing or implementing patches; and closing any other security holes. This is often a collaborative effort between security, IT and development teams, known as DevSecOps.
To help ensure an effective vulnerability management program, CISOs should consider incorporating security intelligence and automation into their processes. For example, integrating Mandiant’s OT asset vulnerability assessment service can reduce remediation windows by automatically updating an organization’s asset inventory with the latest vulnerabilities and advisories as little as once per year. Moreover, Qualys VMDR continuously detects vulnerabilities and critical misconfigurations per CIS benchmarks and segments them by asset type, eliminating manual scans of each asset and allowing customers to set a minimum remediation window for high-risk investments based on risk and exploitation levels.
