Vulnerability Management is part of any mature cybersecurity program. It’s all about the practice of identifying, classifying, prioritizing, and ultimately remediating/mitigation software vulnerabilities. In large companies, there can be hundreds or thousands of different software applications in use across the network. Each of them represents a potential security risk and you must keep track of the vulnerabilities in each of these applications to ensure that they are mitigated promptly. Here are some tips for creating an effective vulnerability management program:
1) Keep track of your assets
The first thing you should do is get an inventory of all of the applications that you use on your network. This can be done manually but we wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re a very small company. Realistically you’re going to need a software solution that will be able to give you a list of all of the applications in your environment, this way you know what software you will need to monitor.
2) Use Subscriptions
Most application vendors have a newsletter that you can subscribe to for any news related to the application. This is important to ensure that you will get all of the latest security updates regarding the applications in your environment. If subscribing to all of the applications isn’t feasible you can also choose to subscribe to feeds for your most important or commonly used applications to stay informed on vulnerabilities related to those applications.
3) Rank your vulnerabilities in order of severity
When you start doing vulnerability management at scale you will be getting a lot of alerts at a time and it’s a good idea to organize them based on severity. This doesn’t just include the potential damage of the vulnerability itself but also things like is this vulnerability being actively exploited in the wild or is the software internet facing. All of these factors help to determine how serious a particular vulnerability is and the more serious it is the faster it should be remediated.
4) Have a documented process
You should have a standardized process around vulnerability that includes how long it should take to remediate it, who is responsible for patching, who manages the activity to completion etc. This process should be documented and shared with all of the parties that are involved in the process.
5) Have a vulnerability management system
For large companies, you should have a vulnerability management system such as Qualys as an example that can scan your environment and tell you what known vulnerabilities are in your environment. They can tell you the number of affected systems, the name of the systems, and other information around vulnerabilities. This is essential for large companies where manually finding these vulnerabilities would be very time-consuming.
6) Document Exceptions
If a machine or set of machines can’t be patched or remediate for business reasons then you need to have the reason documented and have a management-level employee sign off on it. This will ensure that people can’t make excuses for applying the patch without a valid business reason and it’s proof that you like the security/IT person did your job, just in case of an audit or an incident. How to get more free content
If you like this article and would like to read more of our content for cybersecurity insights, tips and tricks feel free to follow us on our social media. If you’re a struggling business owner who needs help in assessing their business’s cybersecurity posture feel free to take advantage of our free introductory assessment and we’ll help you figure out a game plan for keeping your company safe.
