What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is a continuous process of identifying, assessing, and remediating cyber vulnerabilities that are discovered in an organization’s systems, software, and endpoints. Failing to address vulnerabilities will leave them wide open to threat actors looking to cause costly damage to your organization.
However, the constant discovery of vulnerabilities can be overwhelming, as is the stream of patches, code changes, system freezes, or temporary service disablements required to resolve them without severely impacting business operations. To prevent your vulnerability management from stalling, it is time to evolve your strategy and understand how to prioritize which vulnerabilities to address.
Common Vulnerabilities:
Some of the most common vulnerabilities exploited by threat actors are:
Misconfigurations
Many applications and cloud services require manual configurations which render them susceptible to exploitation by threat actors if misconfigured. For example, many cloud services use a shared responsibility model for cyber security, leading to customer generated misconfigurations in the infrastructure which may permit unauthorized users access to systems or data.
Outdated Patches
No matter how well it is built, after software has been released you can bet patches will be distributed to correct vulnerabilities that have been discovered. Failure to apply patches will leave the software wide open to cyber attacks and with the contents of patches typically being public knowledge, threat actors are provided with a handy list of entry points to exploit.
Zero Day Vulnerabilities
Some vulnerabilities are unknown to even the developers. And because they were unknown, no patch is ready to be issued, meaning that a vulnerable system remains exposed as threat actors race to exploit the vulnerability.
What Can You Do?
Working out which vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk to your organization can help you strike a balance between patching and the continuation of business operations.
Maintain visibility of the assets in your organization to ensure you understand your attack surface. Dissect the components that make up applications and products, and pinpoint any obsolete user accounts or orphaned IT.
Giving employees, contractors and third parties only the access they need to carry out the job will ensure that even if a vulnerability is exploited, the attacker’s movement within your systems is limited.
CTI can provide timely intelligence about active threats, vulnerabilities, and threat actors relevant to the organization so they can stay one step ahead of the threat actors and stop a cyber attack in its tracks.
How Can Intel 471 Help?
Our dashboard tracks vulnerabilities at every stage of their lifecycle and provides timely alerts to any changes in the weaponization and exploitation of a vulnerability, along with observed discussions in the cyber underground. An exploit lifecycle indicator allows you to instantly recognise the threat level associated with a vulnerability and pivot to analyst driven assessments and related intelligence reports to ensure you have all the information you need to prioritize your vulnerability management.
You can’t protect it if you can’t see. Use our Attack Surface Protection, a suite of solutions to map and monitor the entirety of your internet-facing assets and see what is vulnerable in an instant such as a misconfigured cloud database or orphaned IT which may be long behind on patching.
We extend the monitoring of your attack surface to the cyber underground. We continuously monitor and deliver up-to-the-minute intelligence on the latest threats to your organization so you can see your attack surface as an attacker would. Understanding how and why attackers operate, allows you to carry out preventative measures that help mitigate zero day attacks.
We leverage our presence on the cyber underground to track malware families and threat actors to provide in-depth, technical malware reports and a live feed of the latest IOCs, artifacts, and C2 information so that you can rapidly identify if a vulnerability has been exploited and work to mitigate its impact.
We are your window into the cyber underground. Our unparalleled CTI offers unique insights into attackers’ intent and motivation to change the odds of an attack. Protect your organization’s vulnerabilities from being leveraged by using Intel 471 to:
