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Today there are more devices connected to the internet than there have ever been before with an unimaginable number of connections. An ever-growing rate of connections provides more and more opportunities for hackers to exploit digital vulnerabilities.
Let’s discuss why vulnerability risk management (VRM) has never been more of a priority in the realm of cybersecurity.
What is Vulnerability Risk Management?
A managed VRM service provides the technology and human expertise to not only perform periodic scanning of your systems to make sure that technical vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are identified, but also to give you the insight needed to prioritize its remediation.
First and foremost, the ability to distinguish between the common terms (vulnerabilities, exploits, and threats) is important to understand why you need VRM.
Top VRM Terminology
Vulnerabilities
A weakness in the measures that are taken to secure an asset is called a vulnerability. For example, software flaws, insecure programming or even risky behavior by staff could come under this category and leave your assets open to threats.
Exploits
An exploit is an attack that takes advantage of vulnerabilities, in order to gain control of an asset – location information or database records, for example. Exploits are often software programs developed to attack operating system vulnerability and gain administrative control. Other forms of exploits could be more socially-engineered ‘scams’.
Threats and risk
Threats are possible dangers that you’re trying to protect against. Whilst threats need to be identified, there can be little control over their existence. Risk in the cyber realm is the potential loss related to technical infrastructure within an organization. This could be financial loss or damage to reputation.
Why do you need a Vulnerability Risk Management solution?
Without scanning your assets for vulnerabilities regularly, you expose your network to significant risk – think of this as leaving your car unlocked with the keys inside.
Implementing a scanning solution is the easy part; however, one size does not fit all. What makes this particularly difficult is knowing what assets to scan, how often to scan those assets, and how to prioritize remediation to mitigate the risk facing your network.
A managed VRM solution does just that for you: it simplifies a daunting task by combining industry-leading technology, expert-level human expertise, and a scanning strategy that is tailored to your specific needs.
The Evil You Know
The evil you know is better than the ones you don’t. Half of the battle when dealing with vulnerabilities in organizational assets is what they are. Once identified and prioritized, it can take a daunting task and split up into bite-sized chunks.
VRM simplifies this daunting task by making it possible to ensure that technical vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are identified and quickly remedied so that asset’s primer defenses are secure from threat actors.
Vulnerability Management Services like MAXX VRM provide both the technology and human expertise needed to successfully perform periodic scanning of all systems.