Vulnerability management is essential in today’s threat landscape where Cyber Dragons (Threats and Cyberattacks) are becoming more sophisticated and widespread. This haunts security leaders because of threats evolving constantly and new vulnerabilities and attack methods emerging daily, it can be overwhelming from Zero day CVEs, breaches, and incidents.
How to take on Vulnerability Management? This talk aims to equip security leaders with the knowledge and strategies needed to combat these evolving threats. It will delve into the “why, what, and how” of vulnerability management, highlighting its importance in reducing attack risks, ensuring compliance, and improving overall security posture.
Why a Vulnerability Management program?
- Reduction in the risk of attacks by helping identify potential threats to an organization’s technology infrastructure. - Maintaining compliance ensures that an IT environment (software, system, infrastructure) keeps in line with any regulatory requirements. - Improves security posture to increase visibility into applications and systems which helps identify issues before they become problems - Proactive vs Reactive! - Save response time by automated remediation will eliminate the manual process of creating a ticket for analysts - YES! - Improve operational efficiencies and help IT security experts to prioritize and remediate the most critical issues first. The limitations of vulnerability scans require a multi-tool approach, coupled with expert knowledge, for comprehensive threat identification and mitigation.
We will cover five key phases of vulnerability management: Understand/Plan, Identify, Evaluate, Protect, and Report. Each phase will be examined in detail, including the necessary tools, methods, and best practices.
- Understanding/Planning - Learn about your environment and plan engaging
- Identify the attack surfaces and risk by modeling your threats and vulnerabilities, identify and prioritize assets and conduct vulnerability scans
- Evaluate the results
- Protect based on criticality for proper prioritization through treating and remediation including patch management.
- Report - manage expectations with proper time frames
The talk will also address the shared responsibility model for cloud environments, AI (oh yes!) and emphasize the importance of ongoing monitoring, assessment, and improvement for effective vulnerability management. We will discuss what you can do about it!
Leaders should know when it comes to vulnerability management that it’s an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring, assessment, and improvement. The goal of vulnerability management is to reduce exposed risk that could disrupt business systems, their reputation and possible negative financial impact.
Be ready when those Cyber Dragons come!!
