The Real Deal: Automated Vulnerability Detection⇢Remediation

If you’re a sysadmin, it's probably no shocker to read about the pains of vulnerability detection and remediation. You’re in the trenches, so these stats may feel pretty close to home:

• Only 25% of IT/Security can access accurate, continuously updated reports.

• 56% of vulnerabilities were exploited within 7 days of disclosure.

• 40% of organizations take over one month to remediate known vulnerabilities

The ‘and’ in Vulnerability Detection and Remediation carries a heavy, manual workload

If you wrote out all the steps comprehensive of the ‘and’ in Vulnerability Detection and Remediation, it might look something like this:

• Before you can even broach the subject of detection, it's important you have visibility into all your endpoints.

• This includes cloud and on-prem endpoints. In complex IT environments, comprehensive asset inventory is a must.

• Scan your endpoints regularly. Leading vulnerability scanners like Rapid7 can do an excellent job of this for you.

• New security vulnerabilities discovered in 2022 reached 24,096. That’s 25% higher than the previous year.

• Given the sheer amount of vulnerabilities in the wild, the scope of these scans can overwhelm IT teams.

• If you have more than one scanning tool pulling in data, you’ll want to capture them within a single source that reformats and aligns reports while also offering a centralized view.

• Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) data and CVSS scoring-based standards enable prioritization by ranking the criticalness of vulnerabilities.

• These industry-wide standards often only provide generalized guidance and may not apply to every organization.

• How actively exploited a vulnerability is at a given time also informs prioritization. Scanning tools, such as Rapid7, can further assist with tagging capabilities and active risk scoring.

• In addition, IT must consider organizational priorities and which endpoints need immediate attention vs. others that can be addressed later.

• Remember to add Zero-Day vulnerabilities to the list!

• If your organization utilizes a SecOps-to-ITOps handoff process, it’s probably tricky because it means managing co-worker cycles, collaborating on strategic prioritization, and balancing too many cooks. This could elongate this step.

• Wrangling time-consuming back-and-forth communication between security teams, asset owners, and stakeholders can take a toll before remediation even begins.

• This step may be a red flag indicating inefficiency in your organization’s process.

• This process can include steps like identifying patching, reconfiguring, removing apps, or adding an agent to an unknown device. Manually, it’s often clunky and unintuitive.

• Validating your actions and making sure you’ve reduced your risks are essential.

• Comprehensive reporting tools that quickly verify if a patch was successful can be a lifesaver when making sure no endpoint goes unaddressed.

56% of organizations remediate security vulnerabilities manually. That’s a lot of extra cycles and headaches you can’t afford to add to the steps above. On top of that, manual efforts increase the chance of human error. It’s better to nip headaches and errors in the bud with automation.