It's time to get proactive about vulnerability remediation

Traditionally, the main concern security teams used to have about vulnerabilities was finding them. In the chaotic pre-cloud security years, identifying security issues on time was challenging, leading to gaps, blind spots, poor security hygiene and a growing attack surface. The introduction of cloud security posture management solutions that provide visibility and detection capabilities resolved these gaps but created new challenges -- an avalanche of alerts that overwhelmed security teams, frustrated engineers and created friction and noise, making remediation a costly, time-consuming task. Still today, many companies rely on these security posture management tools to indicate the existence of a vulnerability but react to these indications with a 'first come-first served' approach. Completely reactive, this approach means that teams are led by the events and alerts instead of controlling, managing and remediating them. Having a reactive approach means possibly missing the most critical alerts, lacking a proper organizational workflow to ensure the right people are addressing the right things, and ultimately negatively impacting your organization's security posture. It's time to get proactive about vulnerability remediation.

From following to leading

Many mature security teams are now taking a proactive approach to vulnerability remediation. Proactive vulnerability remediation refers to the practice of actively identifying, assessing, and addressing security vulnerabilities in an organization's systems, applications, and infrastructure before malicious actors can exploit them. This means implementing a comprehensive methodology with workflows, prioritization and automation to overcome any engineering and organizational challenges, remove friction and address what matters most - getting ahead of attackers, and not playing catch up.

Prioritization

As any security practitioner knows all too well, resources for security are typically limited -- but the tasks continue to grow regardless. With vulnerabilities increasing in size and complexity, and security posture tools helping reduce visibility gaps, being able to focus on the most acute risks, those with a greater likelihood of being exploited by attackers or those that can cause the most damage. By proactively prioritizing these vulnerabilities, remediation efforts are focused, resources are allocated effectively and the organization’s overall security posture is improved. A sound prioritization workflow should include the ability to pull alerts from security products that may exist on different levels of the development lifecycle, parsing and normalizing them across security products and environments and then grouping them according to various attributes such as IT location, CVE type, code repositories and others.

Remediate before the attack

'Shifting left' is a popular approach for developers and engineers in software development, who strive to reduce risk and improve code quality as early in the process as possible. When it comes to remediation, many organizations notice that alerts on vulnerabilities derive from production workloads. Often, vulnerabilities reach production although they could have been discovered earlier in the deployment pipeline, by deploying security scanners earlier. Such a proactive approach would have resulted in a more secure product and a more streamlined process.

Less effort, more fixes

The security and development teams should focus on improving their ability to take proactive measures when remediating. An example of such a measure is creating campaigns. This is done by grouping alerts by various attributes to address similar problems using similar solutions. This helps security and engineering teams proactively use tried and tested remediation processes, focusing their efforts on specific targets and providing powerful project management and automation features that can assist teams with tracking their progress, providing important metrics over the campaign’s lifetime.

Get to the source

One of the most important proactive measures in remediation is tracking vulnerabilities to their source code. For example, finding the docker file of the container on which vulnerabilities were found can allow security teams to remediate at the source of the issue, rather than just locally where it was found. The same code will often be used on different cloud accounts, creating additional alerts on those accounts. Implementing a proactive approach that looks for the source, will remediate vulnerabilities on other cloud accounts that were generated from the same source code.

Don't wait -- remediate

Getting to the source of your vulnerabilities earlier using a solid strategy holds many benefits beyond just being prepared for impending attacks and regaining control over your attack surface. Proactive vulnerability remediation will waste less resources, save time and money and help security and engineering teams stay focused and in control. This will inevitably affect the entire security organization, make compliance easier and faster and improve the general security posture of the company.

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Nir Dagan is DevSecOps engineer at Opus Security