What is Vulnerability Remediation?

by Brinqa Security Team
What is vulnerability remediation

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Vulnerability remediation is the process of identifying, assessing and resolving security weaknesses in a system or network. It is a crucial component of any cybersecurity strategy, as it helps to mitigate or prevent the impact of cyberattacks that exploit known vulnerabilities.

This post discusses why effective vulnerability remediation is important and the best practices and tools to help you understand which vulnerabilities need to be remediated and how to do it efficiently and effectively.  

The importance of vulnerability remediation for enterprise security

Vulnerability remediation is important for preventing data breaches, cyberattacks, system disruptions, and compliance violations resulting from unpatched or misconfigured systems. After all, the consequences of a successful breach include irreparable damage to a brand’s reputation, which makes it more challenging to gain new customers or business partners. 

There have been noted increases in global cybersecurity vulnerabilities in recent years, according to IBM, with the total vulnerabilities tracked in 2022 rising to 23,964 and a dramatic rise to 28,000 in 2023. And 2024 is expected to be event worse A recent study estimates that there will be a 25% increase in vulnerabilities, or roughly 2,900 per month in 2024.

Worse, a recent Verizon Data Breach Investigations report uncovered a nearly threefold increase (180%) in breaches where attackers exploited vulnerabilities to gain initial access to systems. This aligns with the growing prevalence of zero-day attacks targeting unpatched software, which is a tactic heavily employed by ransomware actors. The MOVEit vulnerability was a major culprit that gave threat actors an advantage with ready-made victims.

Vulnerabilities, if left unchecked, can expose sensitive information, allow unauthorized access, compromise performance, or enable malicious actions by attackers. By remediating the riskiest or most critical vulnerabilities promptly and effectively, enterprises can reduce risk across their attack surface, protect their reputation, and avoid fines and revenue loss. They challenge is understanding which vulnerabilities to prioritize, who should remediate them and how, and revealing the details needed to speed MTTR to prevent adversaries from exploiting them.

Vulnerability risk management plays a crucial role in reducing exposures across IT, applications and cloud environments. Regularly updating software, strengthening access controls, risk-based prioritization of vulnerabilities, and understanding their business impact are essential components of an effective remediation strategy that can limit the potential for these threats.

What is covered in the vulnerability remediation process?

The vulnerability remediation process is a systematic approach or workflow for addressing vulnerabilities or weaknesses in an organization’s IT infrastructure, software applications, and other digital assets.

As enterprise attack surfaces expand and new software development processes become mainstream, security teams must contend with vulnerabilities across their entire IT and development infrastructure. This includes the cloud, applications and on-premises systems. As a result, many organizations follow the cyber risk lifecycle (or vulnerability lifecycle) to continuously manage risk across all environments. Modern teams, however, are working to unify this process to span across security programs.

Traditional vulnerability remediation processes typically involve these steps:

  • Detect: Identify and aggregating vulnerabilities by consolidating scanning and testing tools that detect known or unknown flaws in software, hardware or configuration settings.
  • Prioritize: Classify and rank vulnerabilities based on their severity, impact, exploitability, and business context. You may use a standardized scoring system, such as the common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS), to communicate the risk level of each vulnerability. Unfortunately, CVSS scores alone can’t reflect the actual risk of a vulnerability for your specific environment and relying on these scores alone may result in false positives. 
  • Remediate & Verify: Assign and automate remediation such as applying patches, upgrading software, changing passwords, disabling services, or isolating systems. Track the progress and status of remediation activities to verify that vulnerabilities are resolved properly or reduced and monitor for recurring vulnerabilities. Follow best practices and guidelines to ensure effective and secure remediation. Pro Tip: automate the creation of remediation tickets which can be cumbersome to streamline and reduce MTTR. 
  • Monitor & Report: Use automated tools and alerts to stay updated and informed about the security posture of your IT environment. According to Panaseer, 89% of CISOs expressed concern about needing more visibility into trusted data.

 

Key Steps for Vulnerability Remediation

Vulnerability Remediation Steps

Discover how Brinqa is modernizing outdated vulnerability management practices to enable unified exposure management for the world’s largest enterprises. This is enabling a 201% return on investment (ROI), same day patching, and a 20-40% reduction in business interruptions.   

 

Vulnerability remediation practices and tools are key to fast MTTR

According to Edgescan, the mean time to remediation (MTTR) for critical vulnerabilities across the full stack (the complete set of technology layers or components being used) is 65 days. This statistic is worrisome because, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), threat actors can now exploit a vulnerability within 15 days of discovery. Reducing MTTR for critical vulnerabilities allows enterprises to reduce the window for exploitation and the chances they will fall victim to a costly breach.

Nestle is one of the most advanced enterprises when it comes to automating the remediation of vulnerabilities across their sweeping enterprise. The Vulnerability Management team at Nestle has been able to automate and accelerate critical vulnerability remediation to conduct same-day patching, effectively eliminating the risk of a breach related to high priority vulnerabilities. Watch this video to learn more about how Nestle’s CSOC team built a best in class unified vulnerability management program.

Vulnerability remediation best practices 

To move from chaos to clarify and speed MTTR like Nestle did, you need to apply key best practices learned from Nestle and other Brinqa customers, including:

  • Aggregate exposures and vulnerabilities across IT, applications, and cloud systems and assess them by correlating IT assets with, cyber and business context to inform risk-based prioritization: Organizations should adopt a risk-based approach to vulnerability prioritization. However, to do this it is essential to unify or aggregate vulnerabilities and exposures from existing scurity tools and apply the appropriate business and threat landscape context needed for true prioritization. This involves identifying, categorizing and prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their exploitation’s potential business impact and likelihood. Classify vulnerabilities into severity categories and track the MTTR and SLAs separately. For instance, critical vulnerabilities should have faster MTTRs and shorter SLAs than the high or medium-severity category. It’s important to note Edgescan found that out of all the vulnerabilities detected in 2024, 19.47% were classified as high or critical severity.
  • Automate vulnerability remediation task and management for efficiency and accountability: By leveraging automated tools and technologies, businesses can reduce the time and resources required to remediate vulnerabilities and minimize the risk of human error. Automation through patch management tools also helps ensure that security patches and updates are applied consistently across the organization’s digital infrastructure.
  • Adopt a DevSecOps approach for continuous, collaborative, and efficient remediation across the business: Integrating security into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) ensures that vulnerabilities are identified and remediated early on. Adopting a DevSecOps approach promotes a culture of collaboration between development, operations and remediation teams, resulting in more secure software.
  • Collaborate with all stakeholders, to operate with transparency and hold the business accountable for understanding and remediating risk: The remediation process involves multiple departments and personnel, from C-suite to developers and external partners. Security must be a shared responsibility between all stakeholders, and organizations should establish a cross-functional team to oversee the entire process.
  • Expedite security audit and compliance reporting to ensure compliance with regulations and standards: By aligning vulnerability remediation efforts with compliance requirements, businesses can avoid potential legal and financial repercussions and demonstrate their commitment to maintaining a secure digital environment.
  • Measure and report on the progress of remediation efforts to communicate risk appropriately to different stakeholders: Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be established to measure the success of the remediation process. Regular reports should be shared with stakeholders to maintain transparency and accountability. By closely monitoring remediation progress, organizations can identify areas for improvement and ensure that their cybersecurity efforts are aligned with business objectives.

Vulnerability remediation steps and implementation

Remediation stepsEffective implementation
Vulnerability data aggregation & correlationImplement regular vulnerability scanning using reputable tools and stay up-to-date with threat intelligence sources.
Assessment and prioritizationAssess affected asset criticality and exposure, and prioritize vulnerabilities based on potential impact.
Assignment of remediation ticketsUse an automated, rule-based ticketing system for creating, managing and closing remediation tickets. The system also should support dynamic ownership assignment, SLA enforcement, and integration with existing ITSM processes.
Remediation planning and implementationAllocate resources to address high-priority vulnerabilities first. Apply patches and updates from verified sources or implement workarounds or mitigation measures when patches are not immediately available.
Verification and validationTest and confirm the effectiveness of patches and mitigations.
Documentation and reportingDocument all remediation actions and maintain a report for audits.

Vulnerability remediation processes and templates

It’s important to document and apply insights from important characteristics of the business using the right processes and templates. This will provide a structured approach to managing vulnerabilities and ensure all teams across the organization are applying the right priorities to assess and patch vulnerabilities based on their potential impact to business.

Some of the more fundamental processes to consider documenting include: asset inventory and correlation, remediaton ticketing, patch management, alert handling, threat intelligence integration, and penetration testing. Important templates will heavily rely on the nature of your business and scope of your responsibilities but could include asset classificaiton and alignment with business systems, vulnerability assessment reports or heat maps, remediation action plans w/SLAs, risk matrices, and reporting templates. 

An important caveat to consider when creating your processes and templates: every company is different and operates in different markets with unique market conditions. This will require you to tailor your programs, tools and templates to your business. Companies like Nestle have been able to automate vulnerability management with Brinqa to conduct same day patching of vulnerabilities they deem to be critical. Your business will have its own unique characteristics, systems, risks and resulting service level requirement for vulnerability remediation.  Below is an example of how to start thinking about documenting vulnerability remediation SLAs based on aspects such as the type of business system impacted, threat landscape intelligence, and likelihood of exploitation:

Example of a Vulnerability Remediation SLA Template

Vulnerability Remediation SLA Template

Additional best practices reading

Download the Risk-based Vulnerability Management eBook to learn how Brinqa customers Warner Bros. Discovery, Nestle, and Cambia Health Solutions apply a risk-based approach to infrastructure, application and cloud security findings to achieve effective vulnerability management.

Automated vulnerability remediation technologies for enterprises

The Brinqa Unified Exposure Management Platform is an all-encompassing cyber risk management SAAS solution designed to consolidate, reveal and remediate exposures across IT, applications and cloud systems. It streamlines the entire vulnerability remediation process, bringing together data from existing tools, adding critical contextual intelligence and automating the assignment and tracking of remediation steps to reduce vulnerability overload and business risk.

Using the Cyber Risk Graph Brinqa first collects and normalizes data from multiple sources to create a unified vulnerability inventory. It then applies business and threat landscape context to effectively prioritize vulnerabilities, allowing for targeted remediation efforts. Brinqa’s Cyber Risk Graph to become the masters of their vulnerability data by unifying disparate data sources to understand and monitor their attack surface across security programs.

                       The Brinqa Cyber Risk Graph

Streamline Vulnerability Remediation with the Brinqa Cyber Risk Graph

Additionally, Brinqa helps orchestrate the remediation ticketing process and workflows tailored for specific teams and tools and closely monitors the progress for vulnerability remediation tracking. Brinqa syncs bi-directionally with ITSM systems, such as Jira or ServiceNow, and tracks whether or not tickets are closed or still open. Finally, organizations gain valuable insights into their vulnerability risk landscape and remediation performance through highly configurable dashboards and reports, creating a more secure and resilient digital environment.

Discover how Brinqa can protect your organization’s systems and assets. Request a demo now.

Frequently asked questions

When is a vulnerability considered remediated?

A vulnerability is considered remediated when it has been fixed, patched or mitigated so it no longer poses a risk to the system or network. Remediation may involve updating software, changing configurations, applying security policies, or removing malicious code. Remediation should be verified by testing and scanning to ensure the vulnerability has been eliminated.

Why is vulnerability remediation important?

Remediating vulnerabilities is important because it reduces the likelihood of cyberattacks, data breaches, and compliance violations. Vulnerability remediation also helps protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information and services.

Who is responsible for vulnerability remediation?

The responsibility for vulnerability remediation depends on the type and severity of the vulnerability, as well as the roles and policies of the organization. 

Generally, developers are responsible for fixing vulnerabilities in their own code, while system administrators are responsible for applying patches and updates to the systems they manage. However, some vulnerabilities may require coordination and collaboration between different teams or departments, such as security, compliance, legal or business units.

What is the difference between vulnerability remediation and vulnerability mitigation?

Vulnerability remediation means fixing or eliminating the vulnerability and addressing the underlying cause. Vulnerability mitigation is a temporary solution to reduce risk while a patch or remediation solution becomes available. In most cases, mitigation is only a short-term measure.

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