Reporting vulnerability scanning results without well-defined metrics is a common challenge for many organisations today. Presenting vulnerability reports to senior management without essential metrics hampers your ability to convey your organisation’s overall risk effectively.
Inaccurate reporting of vulnerability metrics leads to blind spots for your security and infrastructure team, leaving executive leadership and stakeholders in the dark about the true value of the vulnerability program and questioning the return on security investment. Here are tips on how to measure the success of your vulnerability management program.
Intelligent Prioritization
Without prioritisation and guidance, you may wonder where to begin. Prioritising and addressing your most severe vulnerabilities is crucial rather than identifying each vulnerability. Effective prioritisation and noise reduction are vital because it is simple to miss genuine security risks when inundated with unnecessary data.
Streamlined outcomes simplify your tasks by focusing on issues affecting your security, sparing you from irrelevant discoveries. Emphasising problems that expose your online systems reduces your vulnerability. Intruder simplifies vulnerability management by outlining risks and offering actionable solutions.
Incorporate Automation
Managing vulnerabilities is crucial, yet it involves numerous monotonous and recurring duties. Individuals responsible for patching receive an overload of vulnerability data that is unlikely to be exploited. Consequently, vulnerability fatigue sets in, burdening IT teams with information that is challenging to address.
Integrating automation into vulnerability management can address these challenges and allow employees to concentrate on actionable, risk-focused data. Automated vulnerability prioritisation, remediation processes, and patch management are all viable choices to contemplate.
Managed vulnerability services can offer tailored reports and advice, asset identification and management. This automation allows teams to focus on high-risk areas while ensuring a consistent and comprehensive approach is taken.
Efficiency
Efficiency indicates whether you are addressing critical vulnerabilities effectively without excessive effort. While high efficiency suggests prudent resource allocation, a narrow focus on efficiency may limit vulnerability coverage. Relying solely on efficiency could pose high risks.
While many organisations have extensive coverage, few surpass the 50% efficiency threshold, emphasising coverage over efficiency. This is logical because the cost of not addressing an exploited vulnerability is typically greater than the cost of proactively fixing it.
However, the efficiency is also low due to the inherent inefficiency of patching based on our measurement standards. Since many patches resolve multiple CVEs, deploying a patch that addresses five CVEs with only one being exploited results in a “wrong” choice four out of five times. The efficiency metric accounts for this impact, even though the prioritisation of these other four CVEs was not explicit.
Frequency of Scanning
Managing vulnerabilities effectively relies heavily on the frequency of scans in detecting them. The scanning frequency of your devices and networks can significantly impact your organisation’s cybersecurity. Relying on periodic scans is inadequate for addressing constantly exploited vulnerabilities. Neglecting frequent scanning can result in vulnerabilities spreading across devices. Conducting ongoing vulnerability scans to detect and address weaknesses consistently is crucial.
Rate of Issue Recurrence
Vulnerability management is crucial, but how can you ensure that previously detected and fixed issues remain effectively resolved in the future? Monitoring the frequency of issue reappearance indicates how often resolved issues resurface within specific logical units or environments. This principle applies to web applications, encompassing individual applications or codebases and network concerns.
From a security standpoint, observing issue recurrence within logical units over time assists teams in pinpointing process flaws and enhancing the overall effectiveness of their operations. From a business viewpoint, monitoring the frequency of issue reappearance pertains to staffing and financial considerations: preventing recurring issues and boosting the efficiency of security and IT teams results in cost savings and optimises staffing requirements.
Endnote
These metrics can assist your business in establishing a robust security base. While gathering vulnerability management data is crucial, it marks just the start. Monitoring these metrics will help sharpen your information security program and comprehend how your risk evolves with time.