The Vulnerability Management Lifecycle: A Guide to VM Compliance
- Eyal Katz
- Mar 4
- 5 min read
Locking down your application's environment is much like securing a house—every additional housemate or resident introduces new risks and potential vulnerabilities that require careful management. Just as no two households are identical, each company faces unique challenges when it comes to compliance.
Vulnerability management is no longer a "nice-to-have" but a critical component of any comprehensive security strategy. 84% of businesses have high-risk vulnerabilities on their external networks, and threat actors and ransomware groups exploited more than 50% of these. Let's take a comprehensive look at the vulnerability management lifecycle, breaking down its phases and providing actionable steps for usage in your organization.
What does the vulnerability management lifecycle cover?
The word "lifecycle" can be slightly confusing when discussing vulnerability management. Unlike a typical cycle that ends, vulnerability management is a continuous process aiming to strengthen your organization's security posture.
The vulnerability management lifecycle begins with asset discovery, where you map out the devices, applications, and systems within your environment. Next comes vulnerability and risk assessments, where potential weaknesses are identified. This stage is followed by prioritization of identified vulnerabilities, focusing on the most critical threats based on risk factors like exploitability.
After that, it's over to remediation and mitigation actions. At this stage, it's time to implement fixes to reduce risks. Then, validation and monitoring are needed to ensure you can effectively resolve vulnerabilities before finishing off by reporting and improving on the results.
Importance of Vulnerability Management Lifecycle and Why Your Business Needs It
As engineers, we often understand why spending a few extra days or months perfecting certain aspects of our stack to meet a certain security standard but communicating or translating this into actual business requirements that stakeholders can digest is a different ballgame. Here’s why you should consider vulnerability lifecycle management:
Proactive Discovery and Resolution
Many vulnerabilities like the OWASP Top 10 go unnoticed until they're exploited. A vulnerability management lifecycle emphasizes continuous monitoring, enabling businesses to detect and fix issues before attackers can take advantage.
Strategic Use of Resources
Not all vulnerabilities pose the same level of risk: some more, some less. A vulnerability management lifecycle helps you prioritize the most critical threats, ensuring your team's efforts are focused where they matter most.
Consistent Security Improvements
Regular validation, reporting, and monitoring ensure your organization isn’t just reacting to threats but continuously improving its security posture to meet challenges.
3 Example Vulnerability Management Frameworks You Should Know
Thankfully, standards have existed for many years that provide a guide for approaching vulnerability management. To better understand how these cyber resilience frameworks can guide you, let's take a look at a few.
CISA’s Cyber Resource Review (CRR)
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) provides a range of resources designed to help organizations enhance their cybersecurity maturity. One key framework is the Cyber Resource Review (CRR), specifically Volume 4, which focuses on vulnerability management.
The important thing to note here is that the CRR emphasizes building a top-down strategy for managing vulnerabilities. It outlines four phases:
Define a Strategy – Establishing organizational goals and resources to guide vulnerability management.
Develop a Plan – Turning the strategy into actionable steps for addressing vulnerabilities.
Implement the Capability – Executing those plans within your environment.
Assess the Capability – Reviewing and refining your processes for better outcomes.
This approach might be beneficial for your organization if you're looking for a straightforward, high-level guide to establish or strengthen your vulnerability management program.
NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)
NIST's Cybersecurity Framework is a household name when it comes to cybersecurity practices. It categorizes all security functions into five areas: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. While not a vulnerability management framework, the NIST CSF provides a broad security strategy that you can apply to vulnerability management.
The important thing to note here is that the NIST CSF offers flexibility and compatibility with other security standards. However, its drawback lies in its generality—it's not tailored specifically to vulnerability management. NIST CSF could be a good choice if you aim for a holistic approach integrating vulnerability management into your overall security practices.
SANS Institute Framework
The SANS Institute Framework provides a more targeted approach to vulnerability management through its vulnerability assessment framework and maturity model. Unlike NIST, SANS doesn't offer compliance frameworks but instead provides expert guidance based on decades of research and hands-on experience.
It's important to note that SANS frameworks are practical, drawing from real-world scenarios. However, they require direct engagement with SANS, which might be a limitation for organizations with limited budgets or resources. You could choose this framework if you're seeking expert-driven, adaptable guidance to enhance your vulnerability management processes.
5 Stages of the Vulnerability Management Lifecycle
As mentioned earlier, the vulnerability management lifecycle enables your organization to set up processes for continuously monitoring threats. Let’s explore each stage in more detail:
Stage 1: Asset Discovery
Asset discovery involves identifying your environment's devices, applications, and systems. This step ensures you have a complete and accurate inventory of what you're protecting. Asset discovery lays the groundwork for the entire lifecycle; more specifically, you can achieve this through:
Network scanning to locate devices and endpoints.
Application inventories to track software assets.
Cloud and on-premises resources.
You could start with network scans using tools or leverage existing network diagrams or cloud asset management platforms. Also, you may want to add API discovery at this stage.
Stage 2: Vulnerability Assessment
Once assets are identified, the next step is to scan for vulnerabilities. This phase helps your team identify the security risks associated with each asset, which can help you build a risk profile. Performing regular vulnerability scans across all assets and identifying misconfigurations or outdated packages is a highly recommended best practice for web application security. For developers, this might be similar to running static code analysis to find flaws in your codebase.
Stage 3: Prioritization of Identified Vulnerabilities
Not all vulnerabilities are the same. At this stage, it's paramount to determine what risks require immediate attention based on factors like exploitability and potential impact. Focusing on the most critical threats ensures resources are allocated effectively, preventing "paralysis by analysis." Similarly, prioritization means determining which vulnerabilities, such as those impacting customer data, need immediate attention.
You can perform risk scoring using frameworks like CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) and leveraging previously discussed frameworks like CISA CRR or NIST CSF to tailor prioritization to your environment.
Stage 4: Remediation and Mitigation Actions
Stage four focuses on resolving discovered vulnerabilities by applying fixes, patches, or updates. As a developer, you've likely rolled out a hotfix to address a critical bug in production or update a vulnerable third-party library.
Effective remediation often requires collaboration between every stakeholder involved. Clear communication channels and coordinated efforts are essential to implement and document fixes for future reference.
A key step to mitigate future vulnerabilities is to educate junior developers on secure coding practices and the importance of vulnerability management. This strategy will, in turn, reduce the number of vulnerabilities to monitor.
Stage 5: Validation and Monitoring
After fixes are applied, it's important to ensure they were successful and continuously monitor for new vulnerabilities in the future. This could involve writing tests to catch that race condition that allowed one-time password reuse and keeping an eye on high-value assets in your environment. Alternatively, you can use tools like open-appsec, which automatically prevents threats against web applications and APIs with machine learning.
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