Modernize the Vulnerability Management Program of Your Organization in Ways Never Imagined Before

With digital transformation powering the growth of companies worldwide, the use of technology to improve operations is bound to make the sector either highly efficient or unstable from a security perspective. What, if anything, should companies do to improve the diversity of their security strategies?

Many large organizations are compelled to act, as their enterprise IT teams feel the underlying problems of the organization's security infrastructure are not addressed. It is obvious that there is a disconnect between the symptoms and root causes. Here is why.

Some of the prominent and feared threats and risks amongst organizations include Ransomware, Malware and Vulnerability Exploits.

MOST COMMONLY FEARED THREATS AND RISKS

• Malware
• Vulnerability exploits
• Data leakage
• Phishing
• Extortion or destruction of the organization’s data

This is caused by the large-scale adoption of endpoints, servers, data centers, applications, and cloud workloads, triggering a surge in the number of vulnerabilities.

There is an imperative to enforce a new strategic approach, though it poses significant challenges tactically due to the legacy approach to vulnerability management and a lower understanding of how to tackle the burgeoning count of vulnerabilities due to the expansion of attack surface.

The approach involves focusing on centralized, end-to-end vulnerability management instead of being outward-facing to know the volume and variety of attacks.

This helps because centralized vulnerability management ensures the IT team gains total clarity on the vulnerabilities, threats, and assets to determine the possibility of them getting exploited. Such programs can help companies design and execute broader IT risk management efforts to build a roadmap and identify the best steps to reduce security risks.

KEY SECURITY CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONS WORLDWIDE – A SNAPSHOT

ONE PROBLEM, MANY LAYERS

As organizations try to address the main cause of their vulnerability management shortcomings, they end up finding out that this problem has many layers.

This includes asset exposure, patch management, posture anomaly management, compliance management, risk prioritization, and endpoint management. In cultivating a security value chain to incorporate all these layers and make them function optimally, automation will be a critical component. This cuts the complexities associated with multi-product adoption for vulnerability management. Each layer helps to address specific questions, provides measurable outcomes, and meets the demands of the changing threat landscape.

All the layers must be integrated and automated to properly administer, orchestrate, and secure the company's IT infrastructure continuously, 24x7. The integrated platform must be SaaS-based to address concerns of utilization, adoption, and cost.

A fully integrated vulnerability management platform can seamlessly be integrated into security operations to enable a zero-trust security model.

The platform can identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities to harden the IT environment, preventing attackers from breaching the organization's Zero Trust architecture.

TURNING AROUND VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT

Saner CVEM from SecPod is a continuous, integrated, automated vulnerability management platform that can orchestrate strong system hardening measures on the company's heterogeneous endpoints, servers, applications, cloud workloads, and data centers.

The hardened environment is critical for the implementation of a zero-trust environment. The idea of zero trust gets weakened without this. Integrating Saner CVEM into the company's Zero Trust architecture strengthens its ability to assess and mitigate potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to ensure a more robust IT infrastructure.

SANER CVEM’S SEVEN STRATEGIC PRIORITIES

Seamless Automation
Saner CVEM automates end-to-end vulnerability management with a single agent to proactively scan the entire IT infrastructure in 5 minutes. Manual efforts are drastically reduced, including irregular scans. Scanning is continuous and can be scheduled on demand at speed and scale.

Vulnerability prioritization can be automated for smarter remediation; this helps to filter critical vulnerabilities based on available exploits to prevent an attack. Automation rules can be included for patching and configuring the patch schedule to remediate vulnerabilities. With vulnerabilities getting weaponized faster, automation helps in expediting patch deployment to stay ahead of adversaries.

Platform Integration
Saner CVEM offers an integrated platform of seven modules. The modules include asset exposure, patch management, posture anomaly management, compliance management, risk prioritization, and endpoint management. The platform eliminates the need to use multiple tools to enable 360-degree vulnerability management and is flexible to be unified with enterprise SOCs using REST APIs. It offers a centralized, single-console approach to enable IT & security teams to work in tandem to ensure there are no service disruptions.

Vulnerability Backlog Management
Organizations lose many hours of time and productivity tackling gazillion numbers of vulnerabilities, as they do not have the resources to remediate them effectively. Among other factors that keep them away from remediating are the lack of effective tools to prioritize what needs to be fixed and information about those risks that can exploit the vulnerabilities. Saner CVEM, with its world’s first SSVC-based risk prioritization capability, can rapidly prioritize millions of vulnerabilities with an effective mix of exploitability, vulnerability intelligence, business impact, and context to choose and remediate the risks at speed.

Align IT & Security Teams
Aligning IT service delivery and security teams is critical to drive business outcomes. Saner CVEM offers a cloud-based centralized console approach to scan, detect, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities. This unified approach helps both teams to collaborate with full transparency and visibility of each other’s priorities with no overlap. Security teams can also effectively analyze & categorize risks and articulate them clearly to IT teams. Due to its automated approach, organizations can avoid manual dependencies and IT service disruptions to ensure business continuity.

System Hardening
Saner CVEM offers proactive system hardening capabilities to prevent breaches. It offers a set of techniques and practices to remediate vulnerabilities, reduce security risks, remove attack vectors, and reduce the attack surface. It adopts a methodical approach to audit, detect, and fix vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to meet compliance mandates.

Key system hardening features of Saner CVEM include:

• Continuous scans to detect non-compliant devices. Identify system misconfigurations and deviations. Remediate them according to systems hardening standards.
• Multiple OS support (Win, macOS & Linux) with security features such as account control, lockout settings, application installation policies, password policies, etc. to harden systems.
• Customized remediation scripts to execute system hardening measures and align deviant devices.
• Custom security policies to support more than 500 industry standard configurations out-of-the-box to meet PCI DSS, ISO, EBA, and NIST guidelines.
• Cloud-based console to manage the company's risk exposure and compliance remotely.
• Customized insightful reports to ensure audit readiness of the IT environment.

Total Defense
Saner CVEM leverages multiple security modules to secure a organization's critical assets. These layers provide defensive mechanisms to provide greater security and protect against a variety of attacks. The asset exposure module offers continuous visibility and control over IT assets, posture anomaly management can discover aberrations, deviations, and outliers in the infrastructure, the vulnerability management module offers multiple features to keep devices free from risks, Compliance manager can run compliance scans to address configuration drifts and meet regulatory needs, Risk prioritization to handle millions of vulnerabilities, Patch management module to deploy patches to Win, macOS and Linux operating systems an more than 450 third party apps and Endpoint Management for health monitoring of endpoints, system troubleshooting, software deployment, application, and device control.

Risk Management
Saner CVEM, with its fully automated continuous vulnerability management approach, gives risk management a critical priority and avoids a reactive approach. It heavily depends on analyzing risks and forecasts the impact of risk. As it is an integrated platform, it can determine the overarching risks and the way they should be managed to prevent their implications. By being a repository for governance needs, including compliance tracking and monitoring, it can consolidate risk and compliance information in one centralized location to enable measurable risk management efforts.

DISCOVER AND TRACK IT ASSETS

Asset Exposure enables real-time visibility and control over IT assets. It can continuously evaluate the use of assets and the right size of the infrastructure. The module ensures faster remediation of vulnerabilities, reduced downtime, and improved productivity.

• Cloud-based console for IT asset management to ensure comprehensive visibility, monitoring, and access to assets
• Automated, real-time, live asset scans of every endpoint and server to give a comprehensive, transparent view of software and hardware inventory
• Light-weight agents to enable continuous or on-demand scans to detect any deviations
• Automatically track asset movement in the network
• Insightful dashboards to gather asset data and enable data-driven decisions
• Track software licenses, allow or block applications based on use
• Detect the availability and entry of any malicious or vulnerable assets across devices
• Track and manage licenses of OS, third-party applications, and hardware

UNCOVER RISK & ANOMALIES

Posture Anomaly Management discovers the aberrations, deviations, and outliers in your IT by holistically assessing devices. The module leverages techniques such as statistical analysis, machine learning, and deviation computations to monitor security parameters and uncover potential risks and anomalies in the organization's network.

Module Features

• Spots network anomalies from unusual services and processes, abnormal events in event logs, unwanted ports, unsigned applications, unusually executed commands, and any hidden risks
• Actionable intelligent insights on hidden security loopholes, enabling IT teams to act upon them
• Remediation measures to fix any anomaly instantly Discover attack vectors in the network and implement effective security measures to reduce risk exposures
• Deep visibility to over 2000+ device parameters across infrastructure
• Get insights on security posture with over 75+ anomaly computation rules
• Spot anomalous configurations and behavioural changes such as vulnerable processes making outbound connections, unusual command execution, atypical firewall configurations, etc.
• Verify and whitelist the devices and configurations in your environment by assessing various parameters
• Analyze security controls, from the disabled firewall, poorly configured Wi-Fi security, enabled autologin, outdated OSs or software to disabled BitLocker, etc.
• Understand your organization’s security posture through insightful and customized visualizations

MANAGE VULNERABILITIES

Vulnerability Management module can run lightning-speed scans in 5 minutes, discover, assess, and prioritize vulnerabilities accurately with a cloud-based console and get 360-degree visibility in a single unified dashboard to manage attack surface.

Module Features

• Manage vulnerabilities from a centralized cloud console
• Mitigates risks with comprehensive scans based on the world’s largest, industry-renowned SCAP feed with over 175,000+ vulnerability checks for lower false positives
• One smart, lightweight, multi-functional agent for all tasks with no interruption to users Industry’s fastest vulnerability scanning to detect vulnerabilities and simultaneously schedule and automate scans to implement zero-touch vulnerability assessment

ENSURE COMPLIANCE

Compliance management module provides a solid foundation to meet multiple global compliance and regional regulatory standards. The proactive, continuous compliance checks ensure tremendous gains in speed and time to improve cyber hygiene, recover from cyber exposure gaps, and deliver better audit results.

Module Features

• Continuous scans to detect non-compliant endpoints by identifying system misconfigurations
• Continuous assessment of PCI controls to harden systems to reduce configuration drift
• Assess device risks and remediate them immediately to restore compliance
• Fast compliance scans to align with security compliance regulations
• Customization of policies to enforce regional security compliance policies
• Cloud-based console to simplify compliance reporting
• Auto-generated, audit-ready reports

PRIORITIZE RISK

Risk prioritization module harnesses the SSVC, CISA’s risk prioritization framework to prioritize security risks effectively and rapidly. Understand, evaluate, and handle millions of vulnerabilities with ease. Identify dangerous vulnerabilities and reduce attack surface quickly

Module Features:

• Prioritize risk based on exploitability, vulnerability intelligence, business impact, and context to choose and remediate the risks rapidly
• Combines exploitability, automatability, technical impact, and mission prevalence to categorize and simplify prioritization
• Continuously assess newly detected vulnerabilities and automatically prioritize by combining the SSVC framework with machine learning, prediction, and kill chain validation
• Harnesses data analysis and predictive risk modelling to prioritize vulnerabilities at speed
• Configure and customize prioritization to improve the effectiveness of risk prioritization

DEPLOY PATCHES

Patch Management module can automate end-to-end patching tasks from scanning, prioritization, download, and testing to scheduled deployment. The entire process can be automated using rules for faster execution of patches across the network.

Module Features:

• Continuous, customizable patch scans to find missing patches
• Automated remote patch management from the cloud for large-scale vulnerability remediation
• Patching of all operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux and third-party applications
• Cloud-based console with role-based access control to delegate, track and execute patching tasks
• Continuous patch scans to identify missing patches
• Pre-tested, ready-to-deploy patches for all support vendors made available in 24 hours
• Rollback of any error-prone patches to the last stable version
• Firmware patching for total risk mitigation
• Auto-generated reports to assess patching

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MANAGE ENDPOINT SECURITY CONTROLS

Endpoint Management module is a holistic solution that can automate everyday endpoint management activities with several in-built features to achieve complete visibility, control, and seamless troubleshooting.

Module Features:

• Assess more than 100+ endpoint settings and configurations
• Uninstall software, block applications and devices, stop or start services and processes, apply security controls, configure kernel, and firewall settings, deploy software, execute remote scripts, and quarantine devices
• System health monitoring, such as monitoring antivirus deployments, the status of important system services and files, registry keys, rogue processes, etc.
• Enable firewall policies and other security checks, quarantine or isolate devices or networks, perform sensitive data discovery, etc.
• Block rogue applications, detect available applications, choose, and restrict applications
• Conduct regular audits and disk clean-ups, including purging unused or rarely used files
• Optimize cost and usage with regular maintenance and updates across systems
• Implement strong device control measures to prevent insecure or unauthorized access
• Automate day-to-day endpoint management tasks, including remote execution of scripts to update, manage, or troubleshoot systems
• Build queries and detect security risks present in the network endpoints
• Build responses to fix the deviations and anomalies
• Automate and schedule reporting and audits to implement security controls across endpoints

EXECUTING VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT STRATEGY USING SANER CVEM

Saner CVEM embraces a broader set of characteristics to implement a vulnerability management strategy and reduce risks. The management and control of executing this strategy requires an integrated approach using a variety of Saner CVEM modules. The core components of security posture – Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance are effectively synergized to analyze risks and manage them. The strategy framework minimizes the contingent liabilities of any uncertain events due to vulnerabilities while ensuring total transparency in daily operations.

Saner CVEM modules meet the needs of three main building blocks of vulnerability governance: Detection and Validation, Process Alignment, and Program Management.

It helps ensure consistency and effectiveness at all stages of vulnerability management and confirms outcomes with the organization's security vision and goals. The platform, with its continuous and automated approach, equips organizations with the right tools and mindset to refine the security posture while enabling them to make the best possible decisions with KPIs and reports for long-term cyber resilience.