How to Implement a Vulnerability Management Program?

The need for vulnerability management in businesses and organizations needs no introductions. Every month, thousands of vulnerabilities are discovered, leaving IT admins scuffling to ensure that their networks aren't affected by any.

Automating this process using vulnerability scanning tools can be the ideal option, but to what extent? How often should you scan the network? What should you do if vulnerabilities are detected?

When all of these questions start overwhelming you and your IT team, understand that this is the perfect premise for the implementation of a vulnerability management program in your organization.

What is a Vulnerability Management Program?

A vulnerability management program is a systematic and continual process of scanning, detecting, classifying, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities in an organization's IT infrastructure.

Vulnerabilities can exist anywhere in the network - be it software, hardware, or network configurations. With a vulnerability management program in place, organizations can drastically reduce the risk of exploitation by proactively addressing security weaknesses, ultimately enhancing the organization's overall security posture.

In simpler terms, it's a structured approach to finding and fixing security holes before attackers can use them.

What are the Benefits of a Vulnerability Management Program?

Enforcing a vulnerability management program in organizations has manifold benefits, starting with enhanced cybersecurity across the organization by reducing the attack surface and the likelihood of breaches by threat actors.

Additionally, it serves the following purposes, including:

• Adherence to industry-wide compliance standards such as CIS, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
• Safeguarding sensitive data and critical information from unauthorized access and being exploited via cyber attacks.
• Maintaining business continuity and preventing downtime caused by security breaches.

Prerequisites for Implementing a Vulnerability Management Program:

Implementing and performing the entire process of a vulnerability management program systematically in an organization requires cohesive planning and collaboration across multiple teams.

At the top of the process is the leadership team, the C-suite, as we call it, who approve the vulnerability management tools to be used, the budget required for implementing the vulnerability management program, and the personnel to be on the necessary team.

Next in line comes multiple teams that take up each aspect of the vulnerability management process. It starts with a team reporting on the necessary assets to be scanned for vulnerabilities, while others create a backup plan and strategize the plan of action.

Furthermore, this process ensures collaboration of both IT and non-IT teams, such as legal and PR. In case an organization has been comprised of a vulnerability that has to be announced to the users, the legal and PR teams take up the task of understanding the legal risks associated and communicating them to the affected users and other stakeholders, respectively.

What are the Steps involved in a Vulnerability Management Program?

To summarize, a vulnerability management program involves the following steps:

• Asset inventorying and discovery
• Vulnerability scanning
• Vulnerability assessment and prioritization
• Mitigation and remediation
• Reporting

Let us now understand each of these steps in detail:

Asset Inventorying and Inventory

The internal teams are responsible for scanning, identifying, and creating a list of all assets within the network. This includes the hardware, software, and other cloud resources as well. This step ensures the first level of protection because you can't protect what you can't see.

Vulnerability Scanning

Vulnerability scanning should ideally be an automated process that scans the assets within the network regularly for existing vulnerabilities or misconfigurations. Based on the organizational requirement, the scans be scheduled either daily, weekly, or monthly. This scanning process can be automated using vulnerability scanning tools that automate the discovery of the endpoints within the network to ensure accuracy.

Vulnerability Assessment and Prioritization

Once the assets are scanned and vulnerabilities are found in the network, it is time to prioritize them. Prioritization helps ensure that the vulnerabilities that possess the most risks are identified and mitigated with high priority.

Analyzing the vulnerabilities is crucial because not all vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited or will affect systems. Organizations use several metrics to prioritize vulnerabilities starting with:

• Severity (CVSS score)
• Exploitability
• Asset criticality
• Potential impact

Mitigation and Remediation

Once prioritized, the respective teams develop the remediation plans for the vulnerabilities. Based on the need, the vulnerabilities can either be patched (if made available by the vendor), or can be remediated with workarounds, as suggested by the vendor.

In certain cases, when neither of these is available, the affected systems of software can be off-boarded from the network or quarantined to prevent further attacks. When it comes to patching vulnerabilities, it is important to first test them on a testbed of endpoints. This is to ensure that the vulnerabilities are free of anomalies or bugs that can later cause problems in the systems, post-installation.

When it comes to off-boarding systems, they should be carefully analyzed at first to ensure that it doesn't cause downtime within the network.

Reporting and Monitoring:

One of the most important tasks in the vulnerability management program is to document each step. In addition to this, generating regular reports on vulnerability management activities and metrics helps monitor the effectiveness of the vulnerability management process.

Organizations can track the following key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand the performance of the program:

• Mean time to remediation (MTTR)
• Number of vulnerabilities discovered
• Number of vulnerabilities remediated/mitigated
• Compliance status

Vulnerability management tools with unified dashboards make the monitoring process a lot simpler.

Implementing a Vulnerability Management Program with ManageEngine

The steps discussed above outline the general procedures to be followed for implementing a vulnerability management program. Being a continual process, IT teams must ensure that they use tools that have the latest vulnerability database to prevent missing out on the recently added vulnerabilities and zero-days.

Vulnerability Manager Plus, by ManageEngine is an integrated vulnerability and patch management solution that lets organizations scan, detect, prioritize, and mitigate vulnerabilities and misconfigurations from a single console. It supports a diverse range of devices starting with laptops, desktops, servers, workstations, and network devices.

You can try out a free 30-day trial of the product to implement a vulnerability management program in your organization and thwart attacks.