The Obstacles That Security Teams Face In Vulnerability Management

Uploaded on 2024-09-10 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW

We’re just into the third quarter of 2024, and this year’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) tally has already smashed last year’s. What’s even more concerning is that approximately 70% of reported vulnerabilities are still stuck in the backlog, yet to be analysed by the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

There are countless vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited in the wild, leaving organisations exposed to significant risks. The stakes have never been higher, and it’s clear that traditional approaches to vulnerability management (VM) are no longer enough.

To protect critical assets, from data to applications and infrastructure, companies must rethink their age-old VM strategies, break down silos, and take a more focused, risk-based approach to stay ahead of the curve.
Here are the top challenges security teams must tackle before the calendar slips to 2025:

Challenge 1: Manual Processes

Security teams are stretched thin, juggling increasingly untenable responsibilities. Labour-intensive, error-prone manual processes aren’t helping matters.

Too many teams are still reliant on Excel-dependent security. It makes for slow, painstaking work with a high probability for human error, to say nothing of the attacker tactics cyberdefenders are up against. Vulnerabilities are frequently addressed case-by-case, if and when they are identified.

This approach jeopardises comprehensive, continuous vulnerability management and increases the risk of burnout for the teams responsible for it.

This is where new innovations can help restore the balance. More automated tools augment human expertise, streamline workflows, and focus teams’ efforts on the most critical vulnerabilities. Organisations can better protect their digital assets by optimising resource allocation without overwhelming their security teams.

Challenge 2: Team Silos - breaking down barriers

When security, IT, and DevOps teams operate in isolation, communication breaks down, leading to duplicated efforts or critical vulnerabilities being overlooked. Conflicting priorities and poor coordination hinder their ability to respond swiftly to emerging threats.

A unified approach is key here, fostering collaboration by providing a centralised platform for all vulnerability data and priorities. Breaking down these silos ensures everyone is aligned, reducing security gaps and enabling faster, more efficient vulnerability mitigation across the organisation.

Integrating automation and advanced analytics can help cut through the noise, allowing security professionals to focus on what truly matters. It also reduces response time and improves an organisation’s overall security posture.

Challenge 3: Siloed Tools

It’s not just siloed teams that pose a problem. The use of multiple security tools – a given today – often aren’t designed to communicate with each other. Siloed tools can also slow down processes and hamper security remediation efforts. All that results in security teams drowning in data from a flood of alerts that don’t even speak the same language.

The notification overload also leads to ‘alert fatigue,’ with critical vulnerabilities risk being lost in the noise. We need a centralised approach, yesterday.

Teams need a way to bring some order to this chaos, especially with thousands of new vulnerabilities being reported monthly. Most security teams struggle to focus on the few vulnerabilities that genuinely matter to their organisation.

The lack of a unified, risk-based approach exacerbates the issue, forcing teams to spread resources too thinly across low-priority activities, such as duplicate tasks and weeding out false positives. It’s not in anyone’s interest for teams to spend time on vulnerabilities that don’t present the biggest risk to their organisation.

To achieve a more unified view of alerts, more organisations are now adopting a Vulnerability Operations Centre (VOC) model. This helps by consolidating data into a single, actionable view, enabling teams to identify, prioritise, and remediate high-risk vulnerabilities quickly.

Challenge 4: Compliance Regulations - staying ahead of the curve

Constantly evolving regulatory requirements add another layer of complexity to vulnerability management. It means that organisations have to adapt quickly or face steep penalties.

Given the nature of the threat landscape, organisations must be equipped to address and manage security threats in real time. This means that traditional approaches to vulnerability management are no longer enough; compliance calls for a continuous effort to evaluate potential threats and practical steps to mitigate them.

By moving from a fragmented VM approach to the centralised, proactive strategy of the VOC, teams can stay ahead of these changes. This not only boosts their overall cyber resilience, but also ensures that compliance frameworks are met.

Challenge 5: The NVD Backlog Of Data

An ever-evolving threat domain constantly tests the agility of security teams. New vulnerabilities and attack techniques emerge daily. We’re scooping the ocean out of our boats with a bucket.

The NVD operated by NIST has been an essential resource for steering vulnerability management activities. However, with NIST reducing its involvement earlier this year and a growing backlog of vulnerabilities awaiting analysis, there is even greater pressure on teams to understand the context of the data to prioritise their resources effectively – to own their VM.

To stay ahead of adversaries, teams must leverage advanced technologies and a streamlined approach that prioritises the most critical vulnerabilities. The goal is to reduce the window of exposure to potential attacks in a constantly shifting digital environment.

Organisations can transform their vulnerability management from reactive to strategic by overcoming these high-risk challenges. Adopting a proactive, risk-based approach with a VOC means that teams can zero in on critical threats, boosting efficiency and resilience.

Don’t wait for the 2025 best practice articles to drop to start streamlining processes, enhancing collaboration, and harnessing the latest tech to outmanoeuvre attackers.

Sylvain Cortes is VP Strategy at Hackuity

Image: Alex Shuper

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