Expose and close vulnerabilities across your attack surface to reduce cyber risk
Vulnerability management is a continuous process that should be part of every mature cybersecurity program. Its goal is to reduce cyber risk. Vulnerability management solutions like Tenable One Vulnerability Management help you accurately identify, investigate and prioritize vulnerabilities across your attack surface. With Tenable One Vulnerability Management you can instantly access accurate, contextual and actionable information about all your assets and vulnerabilities within a single platform.
Elevate your vulnerability remediation maturity: a four-phase path to success
Cyber threats are on the rise. As organizations expand their digital attack surfaces, it increases their risk. However, expanding attack surfaces put security teams in a constant loop of finding and fixing vulnerabilities often without context about which exposures actually put the organization at risk. Without a risk-based approach to vulnerability management, it's nearly impossible to get a strategic view of effective vulnerability remediation. On top of that, many organizations still use slow, manual processes and disparate technologies that make it increasingly difficult to see all vulnerabilities across every asset.
This white paper explores a four-step approach to increase vulnerability remediation maturity. Through each phase, you can learn more about industry recognized best practices to dig out of the mountain of vulnerabilities created by traditional vulnerability management practices.
Learn more about:
- Why organizations struggle to remediate vulnerabilities
- What the vulnerability remediation maturity model is
- How to advance your remediation processes with best practices
- How Tenable can help you take vulnerability management to the next level
The state of vulnerability management
Tenable and HCL Software commissioned a study of more than 400 cybersecurity and IT professionals to get insight into the current state of vulnerability practices. The survey focused on vulnerability identification, prioritization and remediation, with emphasis on current priorities and challenges.
The report found that since both IT and security teams contribute to vulnerability management, the lines can blur between who is responsible for what. This blurred area is one of many security weaknesses bad actors are hoping to take advantage of. They're constantly trying new and more sophisticated tactics, making it increasingly hard for IT and security teams to expose and close critical weaknesses across their vast attack surfaces.
Read this report to take a deeper dive into:
- Key vulnerability management trends
- Respondent thoughts about finding, prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities
- The relationship between IT and cybersecurity for vulnerability management
Frequently asked vulnerability management questions
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What is vulnerability management?
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Vulnerability management is a sustained program that uses technologies and tools to find cyber risks across your entire attack surface. When you align these risks with your operational goals and program objectives, you can more effectively remediate vulnerabilities and other security issues that pose an actual risk to your organization.
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What is a security vulnerability?
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A security vulnerability is an exposure, misconfiguration or hole in hardware or software, such as a bug or programming mistake, that attackers can exploit to compromise systems and data.
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What is a network monitor and how does it help manage vulnerabilities?
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A network vulnerability monitor helps you find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security issues within your traditional IT infrastructure including networks, servers, operating systems and applications.
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What is an asset?
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An asset is any hardware or software in your attack surface. This can include traditional IT assets like servers, networks and desktop computers, but also smartphones, tablets, laptops, virtual machines, software as a service (SaaS), cloud-based technologies and services, web apps, IoT devices, containers and more. Continuous asset discovery, evaluation and management are the foundation of a mature vulnerability management program.
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What is an attack surface?
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An attack surface consists of multiple points of exposure (your assets) attackers may exploit. Historically, an attack surface consisted of traditional IT assets such as servers and networks, but today's modern attack surface is vast and ever-growing. Your attack surface may include everything from mobile devices (smartphones, desktops and laptops) to virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, web apps, containers and IoT devices.
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How are vulnerability management and exposure management related?
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Vulnerability management is the foundation of exposure management, which builds upon asset discovery and criticality, vulnerability discovery, risk prioritization and context for threats that may directly affect your organization.
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What is a Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR)?
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A Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) is part of Tenable's predictive prioritization process. VPR combines more than 150 data points, including Tenable and third-party vulnerability and threat data. It uses a machine-learning algorithm to identify vulnerabilities with the greatest chance of a potential exploit within the next 28 days. The algorithm analyzes every vulnerability in the National Vulnerability Database (plus others announced by the vendor but not yet published in NVD) to predict an exploit's likelihood. VPRs are scored on a scale of 0 to 10. VPRs at 10 indicate the most critical threats you should fix first.
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What is an Asset Criticality Rating (ACR)?
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An Asset Criticality Rating (ACR) represents the business-critical impact of assets within your organization. ACR automates asset criticality assessment with data from scan results and a rules-based approach for three pillars: internet exposure, device type and device functionality. These pillars combine to give you an ACR from 0 to 10. An asset that has a low ACR is not considered business-critical. A high ACR is business-critical.
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What is an Asset Exposure Score (AES)?
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An Asset Exposure Score (AES) is calculated using a Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) and Asset Criticality Rating (ACR) to quantify an asset's vulnerability exposure level.
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What is a Cyber Exposure Score and why is it important?
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A Cyber Exposure Score (CES) represents your overall cyber risk so you can prioritize remediation based on asset criticality, business goals, threat severity, how likely an attacker may attempt to exploit it in the near future and threat context. Once you know your CES, you can benchmark your vulnerability management program internally and against peer organizations. This can help you communicate cyber risk across your organization in a way key stakeholders and executives (who may not have a cybersecurity background) can understand and align that risk to business goals.
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What are the key steps in the vulnerability management process?
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The key steps in the vulnerability management process include:
- Continuous vulnerability scanning to find vulnerabilities across your entire attack surface
- Using threat intelligence, AI, and machine learning to determine vulnerability severity
- Prioritizing vulnerability remediation based on the threats most likely to impact your organization
- Remediation through patching or other mitigation strategies
- Verification mitigation works
- Ongoing vulnerability monitoring and scanning to find new vulnerabilities
Your vulnerability management processes should also include routine security testing, such as internal and external penetration testing, and documenting policies and procedures. You should also include routine reporting that aligns your cybersecurity risk with business risk so you can share this information routinely with your executives, board members, and other key stakeholders to build program support.
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How often should I perform a vulnerability scan?
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You should perform vulnerability scans continuously to identify security issues as assets spin up and down in your attack surface. If you do not use a continuous vulnerability scanning solution, how often you should conduct scans depends on your organization’s size, industry and threat landscape; however, consider doing scans at least once monthly, but more frequently based on your threat landscape.
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Which tools are commonly used for vulnerability management?
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Some common tools for vulnerability management include network scanners, web app scanners, and cloud security vulnerability management tools. When looking for vulnerability management tools, look for a solution that includes automated threat intelligence, automatic and continuous scanning, the ability to prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk, industry best practice remediation guidance, and reporting tools with data analytics so you can benchmark your program internally and against your peers.
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What is the difference between vulnerability management and penetration testing?
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The difference between vulnerability management and penetration testing is that penetration testing is a point-in-time evaluation of your cybersecurity maturity and control effectiveness, whereas vulnerability management is an ongoing process to find, prioritize and fix vulnerabilities that expose your organization to cyber threats.
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How do vulnerability scanning and patch management work together?
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Vulnerability scanning and patch management work well together. Vulnerability scanning enables you to find cyber risk across your attack surface while patch management is the process to remediate those exposures.
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What are common challenges in vulnerability management?
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Common challenges in vulnerability management include:
- Complexities of a rapidly expanding attack surface
- Issues identifying all assets across an enterprise and knowing which ones are critical to operations
- High volume of vulnerabilities and new ones constantly pop up
- Hiring shortages of security professionals
- Limited budget and resources dedicated to vulnerability management
- Use of legacy systems
- Too many false positives
- Too much time spent on vulnerabilities attackers aren’t likely to ever exploit
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Why is vulnerability management important for compliance?
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Vulnerability management is important for compliance. Many compliance frameworks such as HIPAA, PCI DSS and GDPR require vulnerability management processes, including vulnerability scanning, patch management, and documentation and reporting. Vulnerability management can help your organization avoid fines and other penalties for non-compliance by demonstrating you’re analyzing and addressing cyber risk following industry-recognized best practices for vulnerability scanning and remediation.
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What is the difference between vulnerability management and risk management?
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The key difference between vulnerability management and risk management is that risk management is a higher-level look at all threats to operational resilience. It includes cyber risk, but also risks related to finances, business continuity and strategy. Vulnerability management, on the other hand, deals specifically with finding and fixing security weaknesses across your attack surface. It is a tool you can use to reduce risk and facilitate more effective risk management.
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What role does automation play in vulnerability management?
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Automation plays an important role in vulnerability management. By automatically scanning your assets for security exposures, you can be aware of potential security risks in real time so you can make actionable plans to address them based on risk for your specific organization and business goals. Many vulnerability management systems also automate remediation such as patching. Automation speeds up vulnerability identification and resolution while also decreasing the chance of human error and optimizing your vulnerability management processes to use fewer resources and decrease costs.
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How can vulnerability management improve an organization's cybersecurity posture?
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Vulnerability management can improve your organization’s cybersecurity posture by proactively exposing cyber risk so you can address security weaknesses before threat actors exploit them. This reduces the likelihood of a cyberattack, while also decreasing the chance of downtime, reputational damage and fines and penalties related to non-compliance.
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What are managed security services (MSP) for vulnerability management?
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Managed security services (MSP) are overseen by a third-party managed security services provider (MSSP). If your organization is having trouble hiring and retaining cybersecurity professionals or you want to free up your existing security team to focus on other tasks, you may consider managed security services for vulnerability management. These outsourced vulnerability management services can help you proactively seek out and remediate cyber risk without hiring additional staff, increasing budget or over-taxing your already busy security teams.
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How can I become a vulnerability management specialist?
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Tenable offers a two-day instructor-led vulnerability management specialist course. It's designed to help users gain knowledge and skills to most effectively use Tenable One Vulnerability Management. Tenable designed the course for security professionals who use the solution and want to earn a Tenable Vulnerability Management Specialist Certification.
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How can I learn more about the Tenable One Vulnerability Management solution?
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You can learn more about the Tenable One Vulnerability Management solution in this product FAQ.
Manage vulnerabilities with the power of community
Tenable Connect community is a great place where people with common interests in vulnerability management can get together, ask questions and exchange ideas.
Here are some sample conversations happening now:
Benchmark for vulnerability management
I would like to ask if there is a global benchmark or industry benchmark available from Tenable for vulnerability management for reference purposes. See the answer
Tenable: leading in worldwide vulnerability management for the fifth year
This research firm’s latest report also provides market insights that security professionals can use to improve their vulnerability management strategy. Read more
Tenable One Vulnerability Management on-prem
Is it possible to install Tenable One Vulnerability Management on-prem, on a dedicated VM, instead of using the cloud console? See the answer
Vulnerability management solutions to know, expose and close vulnerabilities
Vulnerability management is a way to reduce risk for your organization, no matter how large or small it may be. However, creating a mature vulnerability management program is not a simple task. It requires goal setting, metrics, continuous discovery, monitoring and buy-in from stakeholders across your organization. Not sure where to start? You can make your vulnerability management process stronger with these five best practices:
Process-focused vulnerability management
1. Discover
Identify and map every asset across all of your computing environments. Continuous discovery and complete visibility into your environment can be challenging without the right vulnerability management tools, but it is vital for discovering and preventing blind spots in your attack surface.
2. Assess
Evaluate the exposure of all of your assets, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security health indicators. Comprehensive vulnerability and misconfiguration assessment is more than running a scan. It’s also using a range of data collection technologies like you’ll find in Tenable One Vulnerability Management to identify diverse security issues for your organization.
3. Prioritize
Understand cyber risk in context of your security and business goals to prioritize remediation based on asset criticality, threat context and vulnerability severity.
4. Mitigate
Leverage AI and machine learning to spot hidden data patterns that correlate with future threat activity. This will give you insight into vulnerabilities that may have the highest likelihood of near-term exploitation. From there, prioritize which exposures to mitigate first and then apply the appropriate remediation process.
5. Measure
Measure and benchmark your cyber risk to make better-informed business and technology decisions. Report customization in Tenable One Vulnerability Management will provide you with easy-to-understand data about the effectiveness of your vulnerability management program and external benchmarking metrics to help you compare your program performance against similar businesses in your industry.
Vulnerability management and protecting your enterprise from cyber threats
For many years, security teams have focused their vulnerability management practices only on their department or team goals. While that traditionally had a degree of success, enterprise vulnerability management programs that align security goals with business goals tend to be stronger.
By aligning your vulnerability management program to your business goals, you can more easily create and analyze success metrics that enable you to communicate your program success to key stakeholders — like C-Suite executives and board members — in ways they understand. This can help you build a stronger cybersecurity program and get the support of upper-level management so you can access resources to keep your program flexible, scalable and successful. Here are five best practices for enterprise vulnerability management:
1. Establish goals
Identify specific components that are measurable and meaningful and then begin attack surface hardening, asset inventory and patch auditing.
2. Ensure data accuracy
Don't limit the view of your total state of vulnerability. Ensure you're accessing accurate data that’s actionable and timely.
3. Account for gaps
To maintain reliable processes and build trust, quickly identify sources where you have patching issues and track them as exceptions.
4. Deal with interdependencies and conflicts
Understand how processes affect individuals and teams within your organization to create a successful vulnerability management program.
5. Know what to measure
Instead of trends, focus measurement on exceptions to discover weaknesses.
Eliminate blind spots. Boost productivity. Prioritize vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability management blog bytes
Secure your sprawling attack surface with risk-based vulnerability management
From the cloud to AI, new asset types offer organizations increased flexibility and scalability, while decreasing resource barriers. This blog explores how these assets also introduce new cyber risks; challenges identifying, prioritizing and reducing security exposures; and how to go beyond point solutions and reactive patch management to adopt a risk-based approach to more effectively manage vulnerabilities across your sprawling attack surface. Read more
How risk-based vulnerability management boosts your modern IT environment's security posture
While vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management may seem similar, they're not the same. The key to understanding how and why they're different requires a shift from ad-hoc vulnerability assessments to a continuous, risk-focused vulnerability management strategy. Read this blog to learn more about how risk-based vulnerability management can help mature your organization's security posture, especially across complex environments. Read more
Turning data into action: intelligence-driven vulnerability management
Security teams often feel buried under mountains of vulnerability data. That's because many legacy solutions don't provide prioritization context to help these teams understand where they should focus their attention. This blog explores how Tenable vulnerability intelligence and exposure response can help your teams make more informed data-driven decisions to increase program effectiveness. Read more
How to perform efficient vulnerability assessments
Preventative cybersecurity measures are important for a mature cybersecurity program, but most security teams don't want to get bogged down gathering information or getting buried in vulnerability data that has little or no context. In this blog, learn more about the benefits of making appropriate risk-based vulnerability assessment decisions and how scan configurations and automation help. Read more
The importance of contextual prioritization
Contextual prioritization of cyber risk is rapidly altering OT/IoT security. In this blog, learn how you can take your vulnerability management processes to the next level by evolving into exposure management, which adds layers of visibility that are vital for effective prioritization. Read more
Is AI vulnerability management on your radar screen?
As more organizations adopt AI systems, security teams have new vulnerabilities and security threats to address. And, unfortunately, many just aren't sure how to approach vulnerabilities in AI systems or if traditional vulnerability practices will work. In this blog, learn more about how AI vulnerabilities are different than conventional ones and how to address them. Read more
An analyst’s guide to cloud-native vulnerability management
Legacy vulnerability management practices weren't designed for the cloud, creating new challenges for security teams that have previously focused on vulnerability management for on-prem assets. This blog explores the unique challenges created by cloud-native workloads, how to overcome these challenges and how to scale cloud-native vulnerability management across your organization. Read more
Vulnerability management on demand
Vulnerability management on demand
Safeguarding your modern attack surface: transitioning to risk-based vulnerability management
As your attack surface expands with an increasing volume of assets and diverse asset types, so does your list of vulnerabilities. With so many vulnerabilities and limited resources, many organizations struggle to prioritize remediation for exposures that pose true business risk.
This webinar explores how to evolve your vulnerability management practices to be risk-focused. Learn about how to:
- Find and prioritize vulnerabilities
- Automate remediation processes and generate reports
- More effectively manage vulnerability and asset data
- Automate asset tracking and vulnerability scanning
Vulnerability and risk mitigation strategies when you cannot remediate vulnerabilities on production OT systems
Every organization must address vulnerabilities, but some organizations struggle with finding and fixing OT vulnerabilities. This is often the result of using legacy systems, certain operational constraints and vendor limitations.
This webinar explores how you can adopt more effectives risk mitigation strategies for vulnerabilities within your OT environment you can't immediately address. Learn more about:
- Finding and addressing OT vulnerabilities you can't remediate
- Potential vulnerability risk exposure and potential operational impact
- How to implement controls and mitigation practices to reduce risk
- How to align your vulnerability management program with best practices
Risk and threat management strategies in an evolving digital world
A recent Techstrong Research report has identified common challenges for risk and threat management including web app, APIs, identity and access management and issues addressing risk management in cloud environments.
This webinar explores the crucial role of security teams in helping organizations operate in multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments. Learn more about:
- Effective strategies to consolidate and integrate security data into your program
- How cloud-native application protection platforms can secure complex cloud environments
- Steps to mature your cloud-focused vulnerability management program
- How automation and AI can help drive success
Transitioning to risk-based vulnerability management
With limited resources, vulnerability management can feel daunting. That's because you have a growing number of assets and a complex and diverse attack surface that are becoming harder to track, assess, prioritize and address. Yet, it is possible to maximize the efficiency of your remediation efforts and optimize your vulnerability processes — even with those resource limitations.
This webinar explores how you can more efficiently safeguard your modern attack surface using risk-based vulnerability management. Learn more about how to:
- Stop wasting time and take actionable vulnerability management steps
- Find, prioritize and report on all your assets and their risks
- Automate asset and vulnerability tracking
- Maintain vulnerability management compliance using analysis dashboards
Tenable One Vulnerability Management for your modern attack surface
Organizations with rapidly-expanding attack surfaces need a vulnerability management solution that can evolve and change with you. Tenable One Vulnerability Management provides timely, accurate information about your entire attack surface, including complete insight into all of your assets and vulnerabilities, no matter where they are or how fast they spin up or down.
Vulnerability assessment
Get complete visibility into your attack surface with Nessus sensors within Tenable One Vulnerability Management for active and agent scanning and passive network monitoring.
Predictive prioritization
Identify which vulnerabilities will have the greatest impact on your organization in the near term with vulnerability data, data science and threat intelligence.
Asset tracking
Track highly dynamic assets such as virtual machines, cloud instances, and mobile devices and their vulnerabilities with accuracy.
Passive network monitoring
Continuously monitor network traffic to find and assess hard-to-scan devices and short-lived systems across your attack surface.
Cloud visibility
Get continuous visibility and assessment into your public cloud environments through connectors for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pre-built integrations and flexible APIs
Automate your workflows and share Tenable One Vulnerability Management data with other third-party systems with Tenable’s pre-built integrations and well-documented APIs and SDK resources. See more at: developer.tenable.com.
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