The Essential Guide to Vulnerability Management Tools

Vulnerability management programs attempt to identify and correct software vulnerabilities before they pose a significant threat to an organization’s cybersecurity. To learn more about how to design and implement a vulnerability management program, check out these resources:

• Vulnerability Management Best Practices
• Vulnerability Assessment Methodology
• Vulnerability Assessment Checklist

This article describes the tools that an organization will need to implement an effective vulnerability management program. This includes a discussion of key features for vulnerability management tools, the available types of tools, and key capabilities for vulnerability prioritization.

What VM and VA Tools Need to Do in an Ever-Growing Landscape of Vulnerabilities

Software vulnerabilities are a constantly growing threat with new vulnerabilities being discovered on a daily basis. The problem of vulnerability management is complicated by the fact that many applications have complex networks of dependencies and digital supply chains that can conceal exploitable vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability management and assessment tools are tasked with reducing an organization’s digital attack surface by identifying and reporting on exploitable vulnerabilities. To do so, they need to offer certain key features.

Vulnerability Management Tools – What Features Must Be Included

Some essential features that a vulnerability management tool must offer to fulfill its role include the following:

• Automatic Asset Discovery: Corporate IT environments are constantly changing as new software and devices are deployed or retired, making manual inventory management challenging. Automated asset discovery is a key feature of vulnerability management tools to enhance efficiency and protect against overlooked vulnerable assets.
• Scheduled Scans: Vulnerability assessments should be performed regularly to stay up-to-date on your digital attack surface. Vulnerability management tools that allow you to schedule scans when they are convenient for you (such as off-peak hours) reduce the load on your security team and applications.
• Scanning Frequency: Ideally, you should have real-time visibility into your vulnerability exposure, but tools should at least allow you to perform scans when you want to. Verify that vulnerability scanning tools provide customizable scanning frequencies.
• Proactive Scans: New vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis, meaning that applications may contain previously unknown vulnerabilities. Proactive scanning looks for the presence of newly discovered vulnerabilities in your environment after they have been publicly disclosed.
• Asset-Based Prioritization: Vulnerability prioritization based on Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores misses valuable context about the real risk that a vulnerability poses to your IT assets and business flows. Vulnerability management systems should understand your environment, and prioritize based on real business impacts rather than generic scores.
• Reporting: Organizations perform vulnerability assessments to help enhance their security, and vulnerability assessment tools’ reporting capabilities should be designed to support this. In addition to information about the vulnerabilities detected and their prioritization, the tool should offer guidance for remediation efforts.
• Integrations: A vulnerability assessment tool is one component of an organization’s larger security infrastructure. Ideally, vulnerability management tools will integrate with ticketing systems, cloud infrastructure, and other security tools to streamline vulnerability management and ensure visibility across the organization’s entire IT environment.
• Compliance Support: Vulnerability management is critical to demonstrating compliance with various regulations and standards like PCI DSS, SOC 2, and HIPAA. As part of its reporting capabilities, a vulnerability assessment tool should offer built-in knowledge of regulatory requirements to streamline the collection and reporting of relevant data.

Types of Vulnerability Assessment Tools

Vulnerability assessment tools are designed to identify vulnerabilities in a variety of different types of software.Some of the main types of tools include:

• Web Application Scanners: Web application scanners search for vulnerabilities in an organization’s external digital attack surface. These tools may look for known vulnerabilities in the Common Vulnerabilities Enumeration (CVE) list as well as attempt to exploit vulnerable applications using known attack patterns, such as buffer overflows or SQL and command injection.
• Protocol Scanners: Protocol scanners examine an organization’s IT infrastructure at the network level, looking for the use of vulnerable protocols, software, and services. For example, a protocol scanner might perform a port scan to identify which ports are in use and attempt to connect to the software at these ports. Based on the port numbers and the responses of the software, the tool may be able to identify the use of insecure protocols like Telnet or software that has known CVEs associated with it.
• Network Scanners: Network scanners inspect the organization’s network for various signs of potential threats. For example, the organization may have IP addresses associated with unauthorized devices or have devices on the network that are performing unusual or malicious actions, such as spoofing packets or generating suspicious traffic.
• Cloud Scanners: Cloud vulnerability scanners are specialized for cloud environments and look for common cloud misconfigurations and security errors. For example, an organization may have vulnerable web apps running in the cloud, sensitive data exposed to the public, or incorrect firewall rules.

How Vulnerability Assessment Tools Should Rank Vulnerabilities

Most vulnerability assessment tools perform vulnerability prioritization, but this capability is limited. Often, it involves organizing the vulnerabilities by their CVSS score from most to least critical.

The problem with this approach is that it uses a single, static metric that has no relationship to an organization’s environment and the current threat landscape. A vulnerability management solution’s scoring system should be based on the following factors:

• Threat Intelligence: Not all vulnerabilities are exploitable, and not all exploitable vulnerabilities are actually targeted by cyber threat actors. Threat intelligence identifies those vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited in the wild and that should be addressed first to minimize risk.
• Data Enrichment: The presence of a vulnerability in a system and its CVSS score is one data point for making a classification decision. Enriching this information via integrations with other security solutions or assessment types can provide additional information that can be helpful for classifying a potential threat.
• Contextual Asset Data: Often, vulnerability scanners focus on the impact of the vulnerability rather than the importance of the asset impacted by the vulnerability. An effective vulnerability management system understands the role that an asset plays in the organization and prioritizes vulnerabilities to critical assets over those to less important ones, regardless of CVSS score.

All of these features feed into a vulnerability scoring system that highlights threats and risks that pose the greatest threat to the business. These are the threats that a security team should focus on addressing.

Getting what you need with IONIX

At IONIX, we believe that traditional vulnerability-centric approaches to security are unscalable and focus too much on potential threats vs. real-world risks. IONIXlooks at an organization’s digital attack surface from the attacker’s perspective, identifying assets and exposures in the context of the organization’s greater IT infrastructure and business processes. By taking into account the role that various IT assets play in the organization, IONIX can identify those vulnerabilities and exposures that are most likely to be exploited by an attacker and cause significant damage to the business.

IONIX also moves beyond surface-level vulnerability scanning to analyze an organization’s 3rd, 4th, and Nth party dependencies and supplier relationships. By mapping these relationships and their role in critical business processes, IONIX can identify additional threats that may be overlooked by surface-level vulnerability assessment tools.

IONIX’s Threat Exposure Radar enables organizations to move from periodic vulnerability scans to Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). To learn how IONIX can help modernize your organization’s vulnerability management program, you’re welcome to book a demo.