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The Important Components of Vulnerability Management

By Keith Arnold, Advanticom

New vulnerabilities are increasing dramatically month over month. It is imperative that your business understands and minimizes its overall risk footprint. You need to understand your battlefield to adequately protect it.

Businesses need to actively manage their vulnerabilities through a systematic assessment and review process that will continually and proactively address these issues before they are used against the organization in a cyberattack. This is the essence of vulnerability management; proactively seeking out vulnerabilities, then carefully addressing them.

Vulnerabilities can be anything that potentially opens a business to an attack. With infrastructures and networks rapidly increasing in size and complexity, businesses are unknowingly exposed to vulnerabilities. As part of a comprehensive cybersecurity plan with a MSSP, incorporating vital tools and techniques to provide insight and valuable data throughout the design of a vulnerability management plan, including:

Vulnerability Scanning – software that detects known weaknesses in computers, networks and equipment with detailed reporting so that remediation efforts can be implemented.

Security Awareness Training (SAT) – with employees being the biggest concern, security awareness training provides employees with an understanding of how they can support cybersecurity initiatives and combat breaches.

Penetration Testing – a hacker test-run; a simulation designed to test how your system handles a cyberattack.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) – provides a consolidated view of data from multiple sources, identifies abnormalities and provides correlation analysis in real-time.

What concerns could these proactive measures help to find and why is it worth the investment? It could be that SSL certs are out of date, some web patches are missing, or a remote port is open. These vulnerabilities are just waiting for a hacker to discover. Wake up to the importance of the preparation phase of incident response and take a strong stance on vulnerability management. The risks are out there, and the hackers will find them. Prepare your business today before it’s too late.