The What, Why, and How of Remediating Vulnerabilities

Are you wondering about your organization’s vulnerability remediation plan?

Cyberattacks are rapidly increasing every year. While some attacks are exploited through unexplored attack vectors, the cause of the maximum number of attacks is unpatched vulnerabilities.

Although remediating vulnerabilities is one of the critical processes in a vulnerability management program, many organizations still struggle to cope up due to numerous constraints. In this article, let’s understand the effective methods and best practices of the vulnerability remediation process that can help you overcome the existing challenges.

Vulnerability management is complete once the detected vulnerability is remediated. Vulnerability remediation generally consists of 4 steps:

1. Monitor:

Continuously monitor your IT infrastructure and stay up to date with your organization’s assets. Having real-time data on organization assets helps vulnerability scanner to detect vulnerabilities more precisely without missing out on vulnerabilities due to non-listed assets.

2. Discover:

Comprehensively scan your organization’s network with the help of a vulnerability scanner and detect vulnerabilities. Go for scanners that can automatically detect all the vulnerabilities without disrupting business hours.

3. Prioritize:

Prioritize the detected vulnerabilities based on severity levels and their impact on the organization.

4. Remediate:

After prioritizing the vulnerabilities, remediate the vulnerabilities of higher priority first so that it does not leave your organization open to severe attacks. There are situations where you will not find patches for specific vulnerabilities; during these situations’ implement the mitigation measure and later apply the patches once it’s available.

• Prioritize remediation: It is preferred to prioritize vulnerabilities as high, medium, and low priority. This can give you the visibility of the vulnerability that could cause the most risk to your organization and remediate it instantly.

• Set remediation timeline: Have a timeline set for the remediation process so that IT teams can remediate the vulnerability within the specified timeframe without any user interruption.

• Automate your vulnerability remediation: IT infrastructures are complex, and manually remediating all the detected vulnerabilities is tedious. Automate your vulnerability remediation that can deploy patches without disturbing the business hours of organizations.

• Continuously detect vulnerabilities: Remediation is not possible without the discovery of vulnerabilities. If your organization is planning to run a vulnerability once a month/two months, it’s sure that you will be vulnerable for the rest of the days.

• Integrate vulnerability assessment with patch management: Detected vulnerabilities should be instantly remediated effectively. Opt for tools like SanerNow has integrated patch management that can instantly remediate vulnerabilities.

Having a well-structured vulnerability remediation plan can help your organization to eliminate the weakness present in your organization. Now that you know the steps involved and the best practices that can be followed, you can start exploring tools that can benefit your organization in remediating vulnerabilities and reducing cyberattacks.