Vulnerability Management (VMDR) Trends to Lookout

The vulnerability management program seeks to lower risk by identifying and dealing with any possible lines of incursion by threat actors. It’s a proactive measure that is placed by many organizations.

The process includes automated scans, config management, regular penetration testing, patching, keeping track of various metrics, and reporting. It has been evolving and continuously taking new shapes.

Vulnerability Management Lifecycle

The vulnerability management lifecycle can be divided into five steps, each one with its specific role in identifying, preventing, mitigating, and classifying vulnerabilities existent in your IT infrastructure. These five steps are:

• Assessment
• Prioritization
• Act
• Reassessment

Here, we see some of the trends in vulnerability management. –> we can also call its vulnerability management detection and response (VMDR)

1. It’s all about scans and more than it

VMDR is all about identifying, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities in software. It’s far more than the running of vulnerability scans continuously to look for known weaknesses lurking within the infrastructure. Normally, vulnerability management also includes patch management and IT asset management. It addresses misconfiguration or code issues that could allow an attacker to exploit an environment as well as flaws or holes in device firmware, operating systems, and applications running on a wide range of devices.

2. Vulnerability Management Expands it’s capability

Vulnerability management is not a standalone process, it gets integrated with many more security controls to make an effective protection. Some analysts and vendors stick strictly to the NIST definition when they’re talking about vulnerability management. Integration of SIEM with vulnerability management as part of larger suites. Integration with threat intelligence, which prioritizes actions and helps IT to know what to do and in what order.

The term Attack Surface Management (ASM) is the process that combination of people, processes, technologies, and services deployed to continuously discover, inventory, and manage an organization’s assets and goes beyond vulnerability management and aims to improve asset visibility, understand potential attack paths, provide audit compliance reporting, and offer actionable intelligence and metrics.

3. VMDR As a Service

In recent times, the term as-a-service is a buzzword, and the trend has invaded IT and security industry and vulnerability management as a service is also not an exception and has emerged.

With the number of vulnerabilities count increases year on year and it made worse for large enterprises who also have the challenge of not necessarily knowing the full set of software components being used internally by the organization, potentially putting the company at risk. A big trend is the adoption of managed services/SaaS environments, as they are externally managed and offloading of vulnerability management to third parties.

4. Automation of gaps in Endpoints

Due to the way the threat landscape is evolving, the way vulnerability management platforms are shifting, and the fast pace of innovation as evidenced by containerization, digitalization, and the cloud, a new approach is needed.

Example – Tanium kind of platform to automate gaps without any intervention. This includes more orchestration and automation capabilities, stronger endpoint capabilities, and mobile device management. These augments existing patch management, vulnerability scanning, remediation, and IT management capabilities.

5. Container Vulnerability Management

Containers and Kubernetes have become largely synonymous with modern DevOps methodologies, continuous delivery, deployment automation, and managing cloud-native applications and services. The need for managing the security is the need of an hour through container security

The need to secure containerized applications at every layer of the underlying infrastructure from bare-metal hardware to the network to the control plane of the orchestration platform itself and at every stage of the development life cycle from coding and testing to deployment and operations means that container security must cover the whole spectrum of cybersecurity.

Several vendors have announced new container vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management features into their tools

Conclusion

The security of each organization business against cyberattacks from threat actors depends a lot on how you choose to deal with your system’s vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management is an important part of security, and by implementing a strong procedure, it will keep the threats at bay.