Vulnerability Remediation Tracker

Vulnerability management is a vast and continuous process that needs to be closely tracked to ensure remediation is timely and successful. Because of this, a vulnerability remediation tracker is an essential aspect of vulnerability management. We have shared our tips for tracking remediation, so you can maintain complete visibility of the status of your remediation activities.

Vulnerability remediation is the process of identifying, evaluating, prioritizing, and remediating security flaws within an organization’s network, systems, and applications.

The goal of vulnerability remediation is to ensure that organizations have complete visibility and control of weaknesses that exist within their IT estates on a continuous basis.

The terms ‘vulnerability remediation’ and ‘vulnerability assessment’ are oftentimes used interchangeably, but they have different meanings. Vulnerability remediation encompasses the end-to-end process of managing security issues, whereas a vulnerability assessment is a type of IT security test that discovers security issues within an organization’s network.

Vulnerability remediation is an essential part of an organization’s IT security strategy.

Effective vulnerability remediation helps IT security teams ensure that critical issues are discovered, analysed, and remediated as fast and efficiently as possible.

This is critical to minimizing an organization’s attack surface and preventing cyberattacks, which could have devastating consequences for an organization’s data, personnel, and reputation.

Vulnerability remediation also helps organizations allocate resources more effectively. Not all security vulnerabilities pose the same risk, and many may not even need to be remediated. Vulnerability Remediation Management tools provide a framework for security teams to assess and prioritize vulnerabilities, so organizations can ensure that resources are allocated to the most critical issues.

Another reason why vulnerability remediation is so important is that an organization’s threat landscape is ever-changing. The cyclical process of vulnerability remediation helps security teams assess and measure their security posture on a continuous basis so that there is very little opportunity for critical issues to be left unaddressed.

Vulnerability remediation starts with the discovery of security issues and concludes with validating whether remediation has been successful, before repeating continuously.

It’s essential that the vulnerability remediation process is continuous, as new vulnerabilities could emerge at any time, and pre-existing vulnerabilities could become more critical.

We have summarized the complete process of vulnerability remediation below.

• Discover: Identify vulnerabilities within your organization’s network by carrying out vulnerability assessments.
• Consolidate: Centralise your assessment results in one place. This could involve transferring results from PDFs to a standardised database.
• Assess: Analyse your vulnerabilities to establish their severity, the likelihood that they will be exploited, and what impact they could have on your organization.
• Prioritize: Assign severity scores to your assets in line with your analysis, and other factors such as resource availability.
• Remediate: The vulnerability management remediation phase involves implementing your remediation program to resolve vulnerabilities in line with your organization’s priorities. A vulnerability remediation tracker is essential to ensuring your program is delivering.
• Re-assess: Verify whether your remediation efforts have been successful. Ultimately, your vulnerability management process should reduce the risk of your organization being compromised.
• Visualize and improve: Continuously improve your vulnerability management process; resolve any bottlenecks and ensure compliance with your organization’s service level agreements. For example, could you reduce your time-to-remediate (TTR)?

Vulnerability remediation tracking is a key process within vulnerability management.

Tools that can be used as a vulnerability remediation tracker enable IT security leaders to:

• Maintain complete visibility of the status of the security issues within their estate
• Understand who is responsible for fixing which issues, for effective delegation and follow-up
• Measure the compliance of their vulnerability management program in line with service level agreements (SLAs)

Ensuring you can easily track the status of remediation saves a lot of headaches and ensures your vulnerabilities can be addressed and fixed as efficiently and effectively as possible.

We have suggested some of the best ways to set up a vulnerability remediation tracker:

• Generate dashboards: Moving from static spreadsheets to dynamic dashboards provides you with a single source of truth for vulnerability remediation tracking. A dashboard can summarize how many vulnerabilities are open, broken down by risk level, on a weekly basis, and update in line with remediation activity. A vulnerability management system will generate these dashboards for you.
• Unify your data: Creating a centralized database for all vulnerability data, that you can search and filer, helps you easily track the status of specific issues within your estate.
• Utilize ticketing systems: Ticketing platforms like JIRA and ServiceNow make it easy to keep track of remediation. Some vulnerability management systems even automate the creation of tickets.
• Measure your mean-time-to-remediate: Calculating key metrics, such as how long it takes to remediate issues on average (MTTR), gives useful insight into the status of your vulnerability management program. This metric also helps you track vulnerability remediation against your SLAs.
• Centralize collaboration: It’s different to track remediation using email. A vulnerability management collaboration tool enables you to log paper trails of correspondence against specific vulnerabilities.

The Rootshell Platform is our vendor-agnostic platform that helps you implement modern and effective vulnerability management programs, reducing mean-time-to-remediate by up to 61%.

Rootshell serves as a vulnerability remediation tracker by enabling you to implement all the tips mentioned above, and more.

As well as making vulnerability remediation tracking seamless, Rootshell:

• Centralizes security issues: The Rootshell Platform is vendor-agnostic, so you can use it to consolidate results from any vulnerability scanner or penetration testing vendor.
• Aids intelligence-driven prioritization: Rootshell’s industry-leading Active Exploit Detection alerts you to active exploits for your issues, so you can gain the context needed to prioritize most effectively.
• Streamlines remediation: Rootshell 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.
• Delivers real-time alerts: Rootshell 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.