How Effective is Your Vulnerability Management Program?

A vulnerability management program consists of the steps and processes required to resolve weaknesses in an organization’s network. A vulnerability management program should provide IT security teams with a framework for maintaining complete visibility and control of their organization’s security posture, so they can resolve issues as effectively and efficiently as possible. Ultimately, the goal of vulnerability management strategy is to minimize an organization’s attack surface and reduce risk.

A vulnerability management program should start with the discovery of security issues, and conclude with validating whether remediation has been successful, before repeating continuously.

1. Discover: Identify threats and vulnerabilities within your organization’s network by carrying out regular penetration tests and vulnerability scans.
2. Consolidate: Centralize your threat and vulnerability assessment results in one place. Vulnerability management systems can make this process effortless.
3. Assess: Analyse your security issues in line with cyber threat intelligence, such as exploit databases, to establish their severity, the likelihood that they will be exploited, and the impact they could have on your organization.
4. Prioritize: Assign severity scores to your assets in line with your analysis, and other factors such as resource availability.
5. Remediate: Carry out your threat and vulnerability management program to resolve vulnerabilities in line with your organization’s priorities.
6. Re-assess: Verify whether your remediation efforts have been successful. Ultimately, your threat and vulnerability management remediation process should reduce business risk.
7. Visualize and improve: Continuously improve your vulnerability management strategy; resolve any bottlenecks and ensure compliance with your organization’s service level agreements. For example, could you reduce your time-to-remediate (TTR)?

A vulnerability management program plan should empower IT security teams to remediate as effectively and efficiently as possible. Consider these vulnerability management best practices when building a vulnerability management program.

Solutions for vulnerability management programs could be software, platforms, or applications that make it easy for IT security teams to implement effective vulnerability management.

For example, a vulnerability management platform could aid prioritizing, delegating, reporting, tracking, and collaborating on vulnerability remediation.

The Rootshell Platform is our vendor-agnostic platform that helps you implement a modern vulnerability management program. Its powerful suite of features helps you improve remediation from start to finish.

Here are just some of the ways The Rootshell Platform makes it effortless to implement an effective vulnerability management program.

1. Centralize security issues: Rootshell is vendor-agnostic, so you can use it to consolidate results from any vulnerability scanner or penetration testing vendor. Managing all your vulnerabilities in one place makes it seamless to continuously analyse, prioritize, and manage all issues across your estate.
2. Intelligence-driven prioritization: Rootshell’s industry-leading Daily Exploit Detection alerts you to exploits for your issues on a daily basis, so you can gain the context needed to prioritize most effectively.
3. Streamline remediation: The Rootshell Platform modernizes vulnerability management programs and makes it easy for teams to deliver fast and effective remediation, by reducing manual processes, integrating with ticketing systems, and much more.
4. Real-time alerts: The Rootshell Platform ensures you have real-time insight into your threat landscape, by providing you with live updates from tests and continuous cyber threat intelligence alerts tailored to your digital estate. Read more on Continuous Vulnerability Management.

Rootshell’s industry-leading Daily Exploit Detection integrates with exploit databases to serve you automated, continuous alerts as soon as an exploit becomes available for an issue within your digital estate.