What Is Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?
In a world where security researchers discover more than 2,000 new vulnerabilities every month, it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in vulnerability alerts – and to struggle to address them quickly. In fact, according to a 2023 study, it takes organizations between 88 and 208 days, on average, to patch vulnerabilities after discovering them.
With risk-based vulnerability management, however, high numbers of alerts and slow remediation times don’t have to translate to high levels of risk. Instead, by deciding which vulnerabilities to prioritize based on the level of risk they pose, organizations can effectively minimize their risks, even if they are unable to patch every vulnerability quickly.
Keep reading for a discussion of what risk-based vulnerability management means, how it works, and why it’s valuable.
What Is Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?
Risk-based vulnerability management is the practice of prioritizing some vulnerabilities over others based on how much risk each vulnerability poses. The goal behind risk-based vulnerability management is to use security resources as efficiently as possible, in a way that minimizes an organization’s overall risk posture.
For example, imagine that your vulnerability scanners detect ten new vulnerabilities in an application you deploy. If you remediated them in the order they are discovered, you might spend time fixing non-critical vulnerabilities before you begin mitigating more serious issues. This means you would leave higher-risk vulnerabilities unaddressed until you work through the lower-risk ones.
But if you instead worked to remediate the highest-risk vulnerabilities first, you would lower your overall level of risk as rapidly as possible and minimize your chances of experiencing a zero-day attack due to a critical unpatched vulnerability.
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How does risk prioritization work?
To decide which vulnerabilities to prioritize as part of risk-based vulnerability management, teams must determine how much of a risk each vulnerability poses.
To do this, they can start by referencing risk scores and levels in public vulnerability databases, such as those recorded in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). However, those are generic scores that assess the overall level of risk that each vulnerability poses to a typical organization. The actual risk that a given vulnerability poses to a specific organization may vary depending on factors like how the organization’s software environment is configured and which types of security protections it has in place, so it’s important to factor in additional parameters. Some vulnerabilities that have high risk scores in the NVD may pose a low risk to a specific company if the company has configuration options enabled that prevent the vulnerabilities from being exploited.
For example, vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely over the network – without requiring physical access – are typically considered higher-risk by databases like the NVD. But if you run vulnerable software within a dev/test environment that is air-gapped (meaning it is not connected to the Internet), the risk that attackers can exploit the vulnerability remotely is effectively non-existent. By factoring this additional parameter into your risk assessment alongside the NVD score, you’d gain a more accurate understanding of the extent to which the vulnerability actually poses an issue for your particular organization.
For this reason, it’s important to factor in your organization’s unique attributes when performing risk prioritizations. Public vulnerability scores are a starting point, but they should not be the sole basis for establishing risk priorities.
What are the benefits of risk-based vulnerability management?
The main benefit of risk-based vulnerability management is that it allows organizations to minimize their risk posture as quickly as possible. By extension, the practice minimizes the chances that attackers will successfully exploit a vulnerability to breach your organization.
Risk-based prioritization is especially beneficial given that the volume of vulnerabilities and security alerts that organizations face tends to increase steadily over time, and most teams are working with limited staff resources. They can’t realistically remediate every vulnerability as soon as they discover it.
What they can do, however, is make strategic choices about which vulnerabilities to address first via risk-based vulnerability management. As long as they effectively assess the risk that each vulnerability poses to their organization and decide which ones to prioritize accordingly, they can remediate high-level risks as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then work on lower-level risks when they have more time.
In addition, in some cases, an organization may not be able to mitigate a vulnerability on its own. For instance, if a risk exists in an open source library managed by a third party, you can’t fix the issue until the developers supply a patch. But you can likely work around it by, for example, switching to an alternative version of the library until the risk is fixed.
That said, making this kind of change takes time and effort, and it may not be worth it if the vulnerability is low-priority. With an accurate assessment of vulnerability risk, you can determine whether working around a vulnerability while waiting on a definitive fix is worth the effort.
Risk-based vulnerability management best practices
To get the most out of risk-based vulnerability management, consider the following best practices:
- Customize risk assessments based on your organization’s unique characteristics: As mentioned above, generic risk scores may or may not accurately reflect how much risk a given vulnerability poses to your business in particular.
- Set remediation timelines: Although it’s impossible to predict how long it will take to remediate each vulnerability, establishing a target timeline helps to keep vulnerability management operations on track. It also makes it possible to predict how your risk posture will decrease over time, based on when your team expects to remediate each vulnerability.
- Identify related vulnerabilities: In some cases, multiple vulnerabilities may stem from a related root cause. That means that fixing that problem can remediate multiple vulnerabilities. Identifying vulnerabilities that fall into this category (even if not all of them are high-risk) can help you reduce the overall time it takes to minimize your risk posture.
- Leverage remediation guidance: If your vulnerability scanning and reporting tools offer guidance about how to remediate vulnerabilities, referring to that guidance can help accelerate remediation response time – and, by extension, reduce your risk faster.
See, prioritize, and remediate your risks with Aqua real-time CSPM
When it comes to detecting, assessing, and remediating vulnerabilities, Aqua has you covered. The Aqua platform allows you to scan for risks in real time across all parts of your cloud environments, and then generate risk prioritizations customized for your organization. In addition, remediation guidance helps you fix vulnerabilities as quickly as possible, including in cases where multiple vulnerabilities are interrelated.
With Aqua, security teams reduce risk postures as quickly and efficiently as possible, no matter how many vulnerabilities they have to contend with or how complex their cloud architectures are.
