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Explore InsightVMVulnerability prioritization is the process of gaining insights that further a security operations center’s (SOC’s) goal of understanding which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited by an attacker. After discovering a vulnerability, it’s critical to know if it is currently being targeted by known exploitability methods employed by attackers.
At its core, vulnerability prioritization technology (VPT) should function by leveraging the right criteria and business context to properly prioritize vulnerabilities once they’ve been validated in an endpoint asset, application, and/or larger network systems. A SOC typically will establish the right criteria prior to implementing or upscaling a vulnerability management (VM) program.
Security organizations should then validate and prioritize vulnerabilities according to severity and established threat intelligence feeds. These feeds should continuously gather and analyze data on attacker methodologies and emerging threats as they evolve.
In this way, threat intelligence will always stay current as will the vulnerability prioritization and validation process. The common method for implementing threat intelligence gathering is to launch a live, curated feed of vulnerabilities being actively exploited by attackers “in the wild.”
These feeds will typically combine many points of telemetry that even extend beyond network perimeters to look for any faint signals that an attacker may be lurking. This telemetry can include data from honeypots, incident response activities, information from trusted third parties, and more.
In the 2024 Roadmap for Managing Threat Exposure, Gartner details a visibility framework built with the purpose of aiding in vulnerability prioritization:
"Coupled with accessibility is the visibility of the exploitable service, port, or asset. These technologies implement configuration to ensure that details of exploitable elements are not revealed to potential attackers, but not directly removing the possibility of their exploitation."
Since the possibility of their potential exploitation can't necessarily be removed, VPTs must provide the most timely insights so SOCs can prioritize accordingly. Let's take a look at a cross section of VPT types:
This type of VPT typically employs a risk "score" that takes into account multiple environmental factors as well as a common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) score, which rates vulnerabilities on a scale from 1-10, with 10 being the worst. Other factors include:
Leveraging this mix of factors to arrive at a risk score that hopefully reflects reality will help determine how dangerous or threatening a vulnerability could be to an enterprise environment.
This approach typically revolves around the overall importance of a network asset to business operations. Essentially, this type of VPT should be able to take into account where an asset sits in the overall hierarchy of network assets and systems as well as take into account its impact to the business. This information will help immensely when prioritizing a vulnerability for remediation on a given asset.
Other considerations might be if an asset is exposed to the public internet or how dependent other systems are on that asset in their operations.
This form of prioritization looks at vulnerabilities with regard to the nature of the asset on which it was discovered. How is that asset used and how complex or critical is the system in which it sits?
What is necessary for that asset to function might very well be completely different from what it takes for another asset to function, so a security organization needs the context of which one is more critical at any given moment. This threat-aware context can help teams to zero in on vulnerabilities that attackers are more likely to exploit.
The steps a security organization will take to prioritize vulnerabilities will be different based on the type of VPT. We discussed a few above, but there are certainly more methodologies out there.
Diving into this topic from a more general standpoint, a practitioner might start prioritizing vulnerabilities by building a list of criteria against which a vulnerability can be evaluated:
There are additional factors an organization will take into account based on its unique circumstances.
Let's circle back to risk scores and dive deeper into how they’re used in the vulnerability prioritization process. A CVSS is one factor in a risk score, but it’s also critical teams are able to aggregate and enrich data coming in from across on-premises and cloud platforms for comprehensive visibility into hard-to-spot vulnerabilities and their likelihood of exploitation.
A vulnerability management solution should take into account multiple threat feeds that can enrich indicators of compromise (IOCs) with deep context on aspects like software products or patching status. All of this helps inform teams on prioritization actions so they can focus on the most critical vulnerabilities.
Diving a little deeper, teams should be able to contextualize and correlate IOC feeds with their most critical digital assets and known malicious indicators for deeply enriched IOC intelligence. This broad context enables operational streamlining as well as speedier data collection.
With IOC enrichment, security professionals can prioritize top IOCs that need to be blocked, fixed, or shared based on risk ranking malicious indicators that may signify a vulnerability is attracting attacker attention.
Vulnerability prioritization is important because SOC practitioners should always apply their time wisely and in the most efficient manner possible.
If they're spending time on a vulnerability that has a lower likelihood of exploitability – in comparison to another recently discovered vulnerability – then that, quite frankly, is time wasted and it puts the security organization and overall business at risk.
Following from the point above, some patches for critical vulnerabilities are fairly straightforward, but many devices will require additional testing and some level of human input before a patch can safely be applied. It can be tough not only to know which vulnerabilities are more likely to be exploited but which ones are worth the potential extra time.
The overwhelming number of alerts that point to potential vulnerabilities each and every day can also be a barrier to proper prioritization, even with an automated VPT in place. Perhaps a sub-challenge of this issue would be if a security organization even had the proper talent in place to properly tune VPTs and sufficiently validate those vulnerabilities the platform thinks should be prioritized over others.
Having highlighted the fact that vulnerability prioritization can be a challenge even with an automated solution, it’s worth nothing that automation – in the form of constant vulnerability scanning and updated threat feeds – is also critical to addressing the sheer number of alerts that face a security team daily.
As discussed above, it’s also important that teams continue to improve upon a risk-scoring methodology unique to their organizations. Refining this process will not only better inform automation but can also continuously take in current context outside of the security organization to help pinpoint and patch business-critical vulnerabilities faster.
However, patch prioritization must also extend beyond vulnerability risk scores. IT and security teams must also continuously improve communication and partnership practices so they can quickly share remediation duties and progress on the most emergent vulnerabilities.