The security industry has talked for years about the importance of vulnerability management as a basic security measure to prevent attacks. Yet vulnerabilities, and the exploitation of them, are still the root cause of most information security breaches today, according to Gartner. And most of these are not zero days. In fact, the research firm believes that 99% of the vulnerabilities exploited by the end of 2020 will continue to be ones known by security and IT professionals at the time of the incident.

A recent research project by ESG asked 340 cybersecurity and IT professionals to identify their organization’s biggest vulnerability management challenges. At least 40% of respondents cite prioritizing vulnerabilities, patching in a timely manner and keeping up with the volume of vulnerabilities among their biggest challenges. The way to address each of these challenges is to approach vulnerability management based on the threats to your organization. The list of vulnerabilities to address will be different for each company based on their environment and risk profile, and that is what enables prioritization and timeliness and reduces the overall volume.

A risk-based approach to vulnerability management allows analysts to gain a deeper understanding of the threat within the context of their environment and they soon realize that they don’t have to patch everything. In fact, they probably shouldn’t. If they did, they would likely be wasting precious resources that could be allocated to higher value tasks.

The process starts by aggregating and correlating threat feeds with internal data and events in the ThreatQ platform that translates the data into a uniform format for analysis and action. The next step is to augment the data with additional external and internal context to provide understanding of the who, what, where, when, why and how of an attack. With insights into adversaries’ methods, including specific processes, applications, operating systems and vulnerabilities they target, analysts can use this context to prioritize threats, calculate the risk, cull the list and determine which are the highest priority vulnerabilities to patch.

Keep in mind that prioritization is a continuous process. As the threat landscape dynamically changes along with the internal environment, ThreatQ automatically recalculates and reevaluates priorities. This ensures teams continue to learn, understand and focus on more quickly patching the vulnerabilities that are most relevant to the organization.

Learn how the ThreatQ platform can help you overcome the vulnerability management challenge.