Managed Vulnerability & Patching

Vulnerability Assessment is a continuous process of identification, assessment, reporting, management, and identification of security risks for protecting all the systems, assets in the network. Patch management is a security mechanism that is designed to prevent breaches caused due to vulnerabilities in an organization. Typically, a vulnerability is a weakness, flaw or error found in an asset that the threat actor can exploit.

On the other hand, vulnerability assessment, although it is a part and parcel that comes with vulnerability management, is an analysis of a network or a system for vulnerabilities. A vulnerability assessment will also help your organization or business to understand the performance of the cybersecurity solutions. Based on the results, you will be able to assess the associated risk with the identification of weakness and create a better cyber strategy to work. You can defend the threats only if you know where the threats are present.

Objectives of Vulnerability Assessment:

There are a couple of objectives of vulnerability assessment.

1. Identification of Vulnerabilities
2. Classifying the severity of a vulnerability and prioritizing fix
3. Identification the level of Risk present in organization
4. Documentation of the vulnerability and creating guidance
5. Achieving compliance and regulations requirement
6. Identification of gaps and budgeting to fix the gap

The couple of things need to be considered when designing a vulnerability assessment matrix for your business.

1. Identification of the scope
2. Vulnerable assets identification
3. Selection of assessment tools
4. Assign roles and responsibilities to everyone involved in the assessment and management.

Cybersecurity Vulnerability Assessment:

The cybersecurity scanning process includes four steps: Testing, Analyzing, Assessing, and Patching.

• Testing: This step aims to make up a comprehensive list of the vulnerabilities in a system or a network. The security analysts will test servers’ security and other systems by scanning them with evaluating, testing and automated tools.
• Analysis: This step’s main reason is to identify the root cause and source of the vulnerabilities identified in testing.
• Risk assessment: The main motive of this step is to prioritize the vulnerabilities. It also involves the security analysts assigning the severity score or rank to each vulnerability based on many factors.
• Remediation: The main purpose of this step is to close the security gaps. Basically, it is a joint effort by operation teams, development and security staff who determine the more function path for the mitigation or remediation of each vulnerability.

Businesses can often be a target for cybercriminals, and vulnerability analysis can help you fix and find any loopholes in the security before any hacker does. If you conduct searches regularly, you can mitigate the potential attacks instead of reacting to them in real-time. The selection of correct Vulnerability assessment solutions plays a vital role in this process, in order to keep the organization safe.

For more information read: What is Vulnerability Assessment? A Brief Introduction

Patch Management – A Real-Time Business Player in Managing the Vulnerabilities

A patch is an extra segment of code, specifically designed to address the issues called bugs when introduced can make the system vulnerable. Enabling patching can address the security flaws within the software or a system. Hence, patching these is important to retain the applications and the systems running smoothly. It has been observed from a survey that around 57% of data vulnerabilities caused due to bad patch management, which is why it is necessary to understand to implement in an organization.

The main motive of patching is to close the security gaps. Basically, it is a joint effort by operation teams, development and security staff who determine the more function path for the mitigation or remediation of each vulnerability.

Vulnerability Patch Management is a mechanism that helps obtain, test and get multiple patches of code installed on applications or systems so that everything within the network stays updated and protects from malicious attacks.

Benefits:

• Evaluating the performance of your current security tool and providers.
• Helping to inform and guide the cybersecurity strategies in the future.
• Protecting yourself against any potential threats and weakness
• Maintaining compliance
• Stakeholders can reassure the safety and security of the data
• Avoiding any soft and hard costs of the security breach.
• Useful for testing your remedial measures.

Wrap up

Vulnerability assessment and patching offer threat intelligence to make sure you are always aware of your cyber threat landscapes. It will also help you to identify any potential risk and resolve it timely. A continuous vulnerability and patching process can help you identify the potential threats and make you aware to deal with them. Keep your data and business safe, use vulnerability assessment services and stay safe.