As Digital Transformation Surges, Enterprises Must Triage More than 100 Critical Vulnerabilities a Day, According to Tenable Research

Tenable®, Inc., the Cyber Exposure company, today announced its Vulnerability Intelligence Report from Tenable Research, which provides an overview of real-world current vulnerability trends and insights into how organizations assess and respond to the unrelenting barrage of new cyber risks. The research found that enterprises identify 870 unique vulnerabilities on their systems every day, on average. Of those, more than 100 vulnerabilities are rated as critical on the common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) — an industry standard measurement. Prioritization based solely on CVSS ratings is failing the industry and leaves organizations unable to effectively and confidently focus on which vulnerabilities require immediate action.

The Vulnerability Intelligence Report’s findings confirm that managing vulnerabilities is a challenge of scale, volume and velocity. The Tenable Research team analyzed anonymized data from 900,000 vulnerability assessments across 2,100 enterprises. The team estimates that the industry is on track to disclose up to 19,000 new vulnerabilities in 2018, an increase of 27 percent over 2017. Yet in 2017, public exploits were available for seven percent of all vulnerabilities, meaning that 93 percent of all vulnerabilities posed only theoretical risk. For most vulnerabilities, a working exploit is never developed and of those, an even smaller subset is actively weaponized by threat actors, making it difficult to understand which vulnerabilities to remediate first, if at all.

This lack of rigorous prioritization means that organizations are struggling to assess and manage more vulnerabilities than ever and consequently, they are unable to make strategic technology decisions. For example, Adobe Flash will be unsupported from 2020 onward and is not commonly used in most enterprise environments. Yet Adobe Flash still lingers in enterprise environments and its vulnerabilities represent half of the 20 most prevalent application vulnerabilities in enterprise environments.

“When everything is urgent, triage fails. As an industry, we need to realize that effective reduction in cyber risk starts with effective prioritization of issues,” said Tom Parsons, senior director of product management, Tenable. “To keep up with the current volume and velocity of new vulnerabilities, organizations need actionable insight into where their greatest exposures lie; otherwise, remediation is no more than a guessing game. This means organizations need to focus on vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited by threat actors rather than those that could only theoretically be used.”

To address this deluge of vulnerabilities, Tenable today announced Predictive Prioritization, a first-of-its-kind innovation which will provide organizations with an unprecedented capability to prioritize those vulnerabilities which pose the greatest actual risk to the business. With Predictive Prioritization, Tenable is combining a variety of data sources and threat intelligence with advanced data science algorithms to determine the probability of a vulnerability being leveraged by threat actors. Predictive Prioritization will be generally available for both Tenable.io® and Tenable.sc™, (formerly SecurityCenter) in 2019. Read the full press release here.  

For more information, read the full research report, or join the Tenable Research team for a webinar on Nov. 8 at 1 PM ET to review the findings.

About Tenable

Tenable®, Inc. is the Cyber Exposure company. Over 24,000 organizations around the globe rely on Tenable to understand and reduce cyber risk. As the creator of Nessus®, Tenable extended its expertise in vulnerabilities to deliver the world’s first platform to see and secure any digital asset on any computing platform. Tenable customers include more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500, more than 25 percent of the Global 2000 and large government agencies. Learn more at www.tenable.com.

Contact Information:

Cayla Baker
[email protected]