In 2023, USD 4.45 million was the average cost of data theft all over the world, as per reports from IBM. Knowing this fact, around 51% of organizations are planning to increase their investments in security for the next year. Securing your applications, organization's cloud posture and networks will require strategic planning and investing in vulnerability management.
Vulnerability management is a crucial aspect of cyber security that empowers organizations to safeguard their applications and cloud infrastructure. However, to achieve this, there needs to be a blend of vulnerability management tools, software solutions and manual vulnerability tests.
Integrating automated vulnerability management tools along with manual testing methods will safeguard an organization from potential security issues. This will ensure that security holes that can be a potential threat will not go unnoticed.
Let me tell you a bit more about vulnerability management, risk-based vulnerability management and the 5 best vulnerability management tools that you can use.
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability management is a continuous process of discovery, prioritization, and resolution of security issues in an organization’s IT infrastructure and software.
Security vulnerability management system includes steps that are employed to identify, evaluate, and remediate security vulnerabilities within an organization's cloud infrastructure. This comprehensive approach is taken to fortify an organization's defences by addressing security issues before hackers can exploit them.
A security vulnerability is any discernible flaw or frailty within an organisation's cloud infrastructure. These weak points, if left unaddressed, can be exploited by hackers as an entry point for launching cyberattacks, infiltrating systems or data, or causing harm to an organization.
A vulnerability management system underpinned by sophisticated vulnerability management solutions and automated testing tools can be beneficial to organizations and security teams to navigate the turbulent landscape of cyber security with resilience and confidence, safeguarding their cloud infrastructure and applications.
What is the Vulnerability Management Process?
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Asset Inventory: Vulnerability management begins by creating and maintaining a comprehensive inventory of all IT assets within your organization. This includes hardware devices, software applications, databases, servers, network devices, and even mobile devices.
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Vulnerability Identification: Regularly scan your IT infrastructure for vulnerabilities using automated vulnerability scanning tools or via manual penetration testing services. These scans help identify known and potential vulnerabilities in your systems.
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Risk Prioritization: Prioritize vulnerabilities based on their severity, the potential impact on your organization, and other factors like the criticality of the affected systems. This prioritization helps you focus on addressing the most critical vulnerabilities first. Vulnerabilities are typically categorized based on risk levels, such as critical, high, medium, or low.
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Remediation Planning: Software teams need to develop a remediation plan that outlines the steps required to mitigate each vulnerability. Remediation may involve applying patches, configuring systems, updating software, or implementing other security measures.
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Implementation: Once testing is successful, implement the remediation measures across your systems and infrastructure. Coordinate with cross-department security teams to ensure a smooth implementation process.
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Validation: After implementing the fixes, security teams need to verify that the security issues have been successfully mitigated by conducting follow-up scans and assessments. This step ensures that the vulnerabilities are no longer present.
At this stage it is also important to validate that new vulnerabilities or other functional bugs have not been introduced as a result of this patching exercise. This can be done via automated scans through the best application security testing tools and functional test automation tools like Qsome.
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Monitoring and Continuous Improvement: Continuously monitor your systems for new security holes and threats. Keep your vulnerability databases and scanning tools up to date. The process is ongoing, with regular scanning using vulnerability assessment tools, and remediation as new vulnerabilities emerge.
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Reporting and Documentation: Maintain detailed records of the entire vulnerability management process, including scans, assessments, remediation efforts, and validation results. This documentation is crucial for compliance, audits, and future reference.
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Incident Response: In case a vulnerability is exploited before it can be remediated, have an incident response plan in place to detect, contain, and mitigate the impact of the breach. This should be part of your overall cybersecurity strategy.
Vulnerability management empowers organizations to stay ahead of potential threats, addressing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Along with this, vulnerability management tools ensure that IT systems remain resilient and operational, preventing downtime and financial losses.
While no automation vulnerability management solution can ensure that your organization and web applications are free from vulnerabilities, it is advised to use automated security testing tools in your software development cycle.
Cyber Chief is an automated vulnerability scanning tool that can be easily integrated into your software development lifecycle and CI/CD pipelines. It offers API scanning, web application scanning and automated penetration testing for your web applications, end-to-end API security and cloud security posture management. This is a collaborative tool where you can invite your security teams to work on security issues.
Cyber Chief is one of the best vulnerability management tools for early scanning and detection of security issues for development teams who want to shift left.
It will help you to fix the issues early in the development process, saving you the financial costs of fixing these bugs once the application is launched.
What is risk-based vulnerability management?
Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) is a newer approach to tackle and manage potential security issues. As opposed to conventional assessment of security vulnerabilities that tends to scrutinize vulnerabilities as per industry standards or frameworks like ISO27001 certification or SOC2 certification, risk-based vulnerability management aims to analyse the data and security issues based on the stakeholder. Here are three important things that you should know about the risk-based approach taken to manage vulnerabilities.
1. Prioritize vulnerabilities in the context of the stakeholders
One of the main things that differentiates the risk-based approach opted to manage vulnerabilities from the conventional one is its prioritization of security issues based on the stakeholders. When assessing and fixing security issues, it is important to resolve them based on the stakeholder's industry requirements.
This vulnerability management approach ensures that security issues that are more threatening to a specific stakeholder are addressed first, eliminating the possibility of undermining or overestimating the potential risk of certain security issues.
2. Real-time discovery
In risk-based vulnerability management, scanning for security issues is often conducted continuously, in real time. In fact, you should quickly discard any solutions that don't give you real-time asset discovery capabilities.
RBVM vulnerability management tools and solutions can make your life easier by helping your teams prioritise and focus on the important events. But this prioritisation can become more difficult to do for automate tools when you have hybrid networks with a combination of on-premise and scan cloud assets, remote devices, third-party applications.
3. Automated reassessment
Reassessment can be carried out continuously using automated vulnerability management tools. Whereas, in conventional vulnerability management, reassessment will require expert penetration testing to be carried out by advanced security professionals.
Now that you know all about vulnerability management and risk-based vulnerability management, let me tell you about the 5 best vulnerability management tools that are widely known and used by developers and security teams to strengthen their applications and network systems.
6 Best Vulnerability Management Tools
1. Best Vulnerability Management Tool for Software Teams: Cyber Chief
If you are looking for a vulnerability management tool for your software team, you'll look no further than Cyber Chief. It has a user-friendly interface and an intuitive dashboard for web app security, API security and cloud security posture management.
One of the best features of this vulnerability scanning tool is that it can conduct automated authenticated vulnerability scans for your web applications, APIs and cloud infrastructure. Your team can manage the vulnerabilities right from within the tool's intuitive Kanban board or you can send it to your chosen ticketing tool, like Jira, via the pre-built integrations.
Cyber Chief is one the best vulnerability management tools that you can use in your development process and get detailed analysis with remediation fixes that your dev teams can implement easily.
Because of the depth of vulnerability patching information offered by Cyber Chief, your developers and QA teams will no longer be reliant on security experts for assistance. This in itself can save you at least $140,000 per application, per year.
2. Tenable Nessus
Tenable Nessus is one of the better regarded vulnerability management solutions that provides several security scanning tools such as role-based access controls and asset grouping, which helps in managing and addressing security threats.
Nessus Expert, in particular, is a valuable vulnerability management tool for medium to large-sized enterprises who employ penetration testers and security consultants with specialist security skills. One of the most prominent features of this vulnerability manager is its external attack surface scanning, which can be beneficial for a wide range of users who are seeking a comprehensive vulnerability assessment solution.
Features:
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Integrations are available for other security solutions such as Fortinet, Palo Alto and Splunk.
Grouping for Assets
Option for implementation of role-based access controls.
Free trial available.
3. Rapid7 InsightVM
Rapid7 InsightVM is a versatile and scalable vulnerability management solution designed to cater to enterprises across various industries. It provides excellent automated security testing capability, rendering it a popular brand among large enterprises.
For organizations seeking to augment their cybersecurity posture without the need for an in-house security team, Rapid7 InsightVM may be a suitable vulnerability manager solution, however, recent customer reviews seem to suggest that new features may be somewhat lacking.
Features:
Personalized dashboards for risk overview.
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Integrations available for other security solutions such as CyberArk, Palo Alto & McAfee
Threat feed integration.
Free trial available.
4. Qualys VMDR
Qualys Vulnerability Management (VMDR) is a vulnerability management solution ideal for medium-to-large enterprises that already have well-established security infrastructure. The vulnerability management solution seamlessly integrates with existing IT service management tools such as Jira and ServiceNow, facilitating a holistic approach to cyber risk management.
Features
Automated no-code workflow for remediation tasks.
Identifies IoT assets.
Patch management for vulnerabilities detected.
Free trial available.
5. Frontline VM by Digital Defense
Frontline Vulnerability Manager by Digital Defense is regarded as one of the best vulnerability management software available out there. This vulnerability manager is popular among organizations of varying sizes for its versatile vulnerability management features. It offers vulnerability management across varied network assets for organizations. This vulnerability management tool has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to use and integrate into your security workflow.
Features
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Integrations are available for vendors like LogRhythm, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto.
Manage role-based access controls.
Grouping of Assets
Network Mapping
6. Holm Security
Holm Security is a widely popular vulnerability management tool, best known for its phishing awareness training feature. The vulnerability management tool is also well-known in the SMB landscape, because of phishing awareness which is crucial in the complex security infrastructure of large-scale organizations as well.
The Phishing Awareness feature of this vulnerability management solution empowers organizations to simulate phishing attacks on their personnel, effectively pinpointing vulnerabilities and fostering a culture of heightened security awareness and readiness among security teams.
Features:
Ease of integration with existing CI/CD tools.
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A collaborative tool with the option to assign role-based access controls
Identifies IoT assets
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Integrations are available for other security solutions such as Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk.
So, now that you know what are the stakes for negligence of security issues,
you need to add an automated vulnerability management tool to your software
development lifecycle. This will empower your developers and security teams to
fix any potential issues throughout the development process, which in turn
will help you with patching vulnerabilities before shipping the next release
of your software solution to prod.
