By Dr. Rajesh Rasiah
Risk knows no boundaries. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business, a mammoth corporation, or a government entity, every organisation with an internet connection carries risk. New susceptibilities are discovered each day and the speed at which these new threats are created make securing critical assets even trickier. Now more than ever, in this volatile post-pandemic environment, assessing and managing risk within an organisation, whether on the network or via hardware or software, has become a foundational element of a strong cybersecurity posture. The best solution to quickly immunise infrastructure from these threats is by identifying and eliminating their foundation: vulnerabilities.
A vulnerability is a defect/bug that allows an external entity to directly or indirectly influence the availability, reliability, confidentiality or integrity of a system, application or data. New vulnerabilities appear daily because of software flaws, a faulty configuration of applications, and human error. If undiscovered, these can be exploited, resulting in erratic programme behaviour, illegal network entry, privacy violations and interrupting business operations. In fact, 44% of breaches are due to known vulnerabilities that are two to four years old. This is where a strong vulnerability programme is critical.
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when curating and fortifying your vulnerability management programme:
1. Discover and categorise assets
To manage vulnerabilities, it is important first to understand what assets are there in a network and then test to find any vulnerabilities that may exist. This is when you create and continuously maintain a database of all IP devices attached to your network. Scanning is most often done by focusing on a particular IP or range of addresses, so organising your database by IPs makes sense.
2. Identify assets based on business risk
Now that you have a big picture of your assets, where they reside and how they are categorised, it’s time to prioritise. It is important to isolate critical assets that directly impact business risk. For example, a database contains social security numbers or credit card information.
3. Scan for vulnerabilities
Scanning is the foundational process for finding and fixing network vulnerabilities. Traditional vulnerability scanners are isolated from each other, each collecting their own set of vulnerabilities, resulting in data overload. Scan results should be consolidated and normalised into a unified repository.
4. Prioritise vulnerabilities
Traditional vulnerability management solutions often produce thousands of “high severity” vulnerabilities for the operations staff to remediate. This scan data overload leads to confusing priorities and complicates remediation efforts. Prioritisation based on previously defined critical assets, exploit types, business risk, among other things, can help reduce this overload.
5. Generate attack paths to high-risk assets
Attack paths reflect the ability to understand where the critical assets are and what the topography around those assets looks like considering vulnerabilities, exploits, network configurations, and potential attacker patterns. This will help define exposure points that should be locked down and any other network areas that could lead an adversary to your critical data.
6. Remediate. Patch. Monitor.
Strong reporting for all levels within the organisation is required for risk reporting, trending, compliance efforts, remediation efforts and overall business risk. As these areas have been defined, they should be shared with other constituents. The data discovered by scanning, consolidating, prioritising, and modelling attack paths should be translated into tangible remediation tasks for IT operations through service desk tools or patch management.
7. Validate
Validation is extremely important and often overlooked. Since remediation responsibilities usually fall on a different team than information security, remediation validation is important for closing the loop. These validation efforts should output a report comparing new results with actual results to ensure the vulnerabilities have been addressed.
Vulnerability management does not have to be a hard chore when it comes to companies managing cloud infrastructures. A next-gen cloud security company generally offers a powerful, novel product – as an agentless, data-driven cloud security solution.
It provides security, compliance, and governance for businesses by continuously analysing cloud infrastructures for multiple types of risks and detecting and resolving them in real-time. This takes off a huge burden of risk assessment and management from companies, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of the cloud while having an expert scan their systems for threats, leaving time and energy to focus more on elevating the everyday functionalities of their operations.
In conclusion, vulnerabilities are the loopholes that cybercriminals can use or exploit to disrupt your systems’ security and smooth functionalities. In a rapidly evolving cyber world, vulnerability management gives an organised approach to managing cybersecurity systems and mitigating risks for organisations. The time to get started is now!
(The writer is the Cloud Security Compliance and Risk Officer at Dygisec, a “next-gen” technology product company focused on cloud security and compliance)BMD