Mitigation and remediation are two words that are used a lot in cybersecurity. Most times they are used interchangeably. Although there is a stark contrast between them, both play a major role in security service providers’ risk-related decisions. In this post, we will take a closer look at both strategies and how threat intelligence contributes to each.

Mitigation Versus Remediation: Knowing the Differences

Remediation and mitigation are both a direct result of risk assessment, following the discovery of a new or advanced persistent threat (APT). Remediation involves the removal of threat when it can be eliminated. On the other hand, mitigation involves creating tactics to reduce a threat’s negative impact when it cannot be eliminated. Remediation is straightforward because it ascertains attack patterns using indicators of compromise (IoCs). For instance, when a scan catches a vulnerability, it has to be patched effectively in order to prevent malicious individuals from exploiting it. The immediate objective of vulnerability remediation is to stop threats from entering the network by closing security holes. In mitigation, removing the threat is non-negotiable, as it may lead to service disruption. Mitigation involves conducting risk assessments in order to measure the risk profile of a specific threat and ensure that the remaining risks are acceptable. Unlike remediation, a vulnerability can be left unaddressed for the time being provided it does not present offensive risks or threats. Once a vulnerability has been discovered, the best solution is to remediate it. In other words, allow IT professionals or IT administrators to fix or patch the vulnerability before it can become a security threat. Generally, it’s the organization’s IT security team, system administrators and system owners who come together to know which actions are suitable. Remediation can be as complex as replacing a fleet of physical servers across an organization’s network or as simple as applying a readily available software patch. When remediation activities are finalized, it’s best to always run another vulnerability scan to confirm that the vulnerability has been fully resolved. Nevertheless, sometimes remediation is not possible, for many reasons. Firstly, not all vulnerabilities need to be fixed. For instance, if the vulnerability is identified in Adobe Flash Player but the use of Flash Player is already disabled in all applications and web browsers company-wide, there is no need for action. Also, sometimes you may be prevented from taking remediation action by a technology issue, where a patch is not yet available for the vulnerability in question. Other times, you may experience setbacks from your own organization. This often occurs when a vulnerability is on a customer-facing system and your company wants to avoid the downtime needed to patch a vulnerability. In those cases, the concept of mitigation will come into play. That’s a process that reduces the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited. For instance, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation can route suspicious traffic to a centralized location where it is filtered. Generally, mitigation is not the final step in dealing with a vulnerability. It’s more of a way to buy time for the company to either wait for the technology to be released or find a more suitable time to schedule downtime in the system. In the long run, fixing a network security issue is better than blocking the port that could expose it.

How Mitigation and Remediation Figure in the Kill Chain

Nowadays, organizations know better. Rather than assume their applications are impenetrable, they are searching for proactive ways to uncover ongoing attacks through computer forensics, penetration testing or threat intelligence. Therefore, many IT security experts understand that they need to go beyond the kill chain model to more effectively address attacks. Their solution is through mitigation and remediation techniques guided by the fact that attacks do not stop with interruption. Let’s take a closer look at the steps in a kill chain:

1. Reconnaissance: Attackers research the target by looking at public Internet records for expired domains or certificates they can use for attacks.
2. Weaponization: Once weaknesses are spotted in the target’s network, cyber attackers create the payload they will use to infiltrate defenses.
3. Delivery: This is the actual act of delivering a malicious payload. Links embedded in spam, phishing emails or malware-laced email attachments are normally used.
4. Exploitation: This only occurs when attackers choose to enter a network by abusing a vulnerability in a system or connected device.
5. Installation: Attackers install malware on a vulnerable system in the network to elevate access privileges, steal data or gain control.
6. Command and Control: This involves the use of a command and control server to communicate with infected hosts within the target’s network.
7. Actions on Objectives: Attackers deliver the final blow to the target network, often by exfiltrating data or shutting down operations.

Knowing the elements that make up the kill chain allows cybersecurity professionals to take the right action to prevent attacks. Incident responders can redirect bad traffic to black holes during an ongoing DDoS attack. Additionally, if a similar incident occurs in the future, the best practices they followed in the past can be reapplied, reducing damage and downtime.

How Threat Intelligence Improves Both Processes

IT security experts depend on threat feeds to offer actionable intelligence for their mitigation or vulnerability remediation techniques. Threats are often documented in publicly available databases. To make sense of innumerable datasets, they can use aggregated threat intelligence for faster mitigation and remediation. External data feeds give cybersecurity specialists access to accurate and real-time information which include the following:

1. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could be signs of malicious connections.
2. Domain infrastructure data that reveals registrants, organization data, email addresses and other information, which may be tied to ongoing publicized attacks.
3. Reputation scores to know how safe or unsafe accessing a particular domain is.
4. A list of domains that resolve to a particular IP address and could reveal ties between both known and unknown malicious hosts.

Threat intelligence empowers security experts by giving them access to structured data to support their remediation and mitigation processes. While policy exceptions and other controls may hold them back from implementing remediation methods, threat intelligence enables them to gain better visibility into all potential attack vectors. If you need a cybersecurity tool for vulnerability remediation, vulnerability mitigation and protecting your data against cyber threats, choose Vicarius. Vicarius is a vulnerability management software that targets cybersecurity officers and operators, as well as IT managers and operators from the U.S. market.   Photo by Alice Yamamura on Unsplash

Much to our detriment, new software vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis. For security professionals and companies alike, this becomes a significant concern. Companies must be able to follow a procedure to guarantee that they do not fall prey to these flaws.

Vulnerability and patch management strategies are the best ways to do this. This post discusses key areas where security professionals can concentrate their efforts in order to establish these programs.

The Vulnerability Management Process: Summarized
Vulnerability management, according to the SANS Institute, is the process of identifying, eliminating, and mitigating the inherent risk of vulnerabilities. The goal of a vulnerability assessment program is to develop controls and processes that will help the company discover weaknesses in its technological infrastructure and information system components.

This is critical because attackers may attempt to exploit these flaws in order to obtain unauthorized access to the organization’s systems, disrupt company operations, and steal or leak important data.

When vulnerabilities are discovered, the best method to protect against them is to apply patches that correct the flaws, if any exist. The goal of a company’s patch management policy and program is to define the controls and processes that will protect the company from the vulnerabilities and threats discovered by the vulnerability assessment program. These vulnerabilities and dangers might jeopardize the information system’s security and the data entrusted to it.

What is Security Remediation?
The next essential stage in vulnerability management is security repair. It focuses on lowering security risk by closing security gaps as soon as feasible so that bad actors can’t infiltrate systems. “What is a vulnerability repair process?” you might wonder.

Vulnerability tasks involve assessing the vulnerabilities discovered by your scans, assigning risk levels based on their criticality and potential impact on your environment, preparing responses, and monitoring actions. Vulnerability remediation best practices include:

• Maintaining a single source of truth for all vulnerability management teams, including security professionals, IT experts and DevOps.
• Attempting to automate as much as possible in order to expedite and enhance remediation.
• Incorporating service ticket monitoring in the mix.
• Creating remediation playbooks that are specific to your organization’s environment.
• Using your scanning tool to give the engineers who are doing the remediation access to information about the vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability Remediation Guidelines
The following are 5 ideas for implementing controls that will help companies build a regularly configured environment that is safe against known vulnerabilities.

1) Establish a Threat Monitoring Strategy
It’s critical for your security staff to remain up to date on the threats that could exploit your company’s information. They accomplish this through evaluating vendor notifications of threats, patches, and system upgrades, as well as receiving information from US CERT, which is always up to date with the most recent information. Any risks discovered by the team must be handled by the vulnerability remediation management.

2) Assess Vulnerabilities on a Regular Basis
This isn’t something you do once and never think about again. Because the evaluation is simply a snapshot of your position at a certain point in time, it might alter when new vulnerabilities are uncovered. As a result, you must design a structured program with clearly defined roles and responsibilities that focuses on the development and maintenance of effective vulnerability protocols and procedures.

3) Create and Maintain a Set of Baseline Setups
Using documented settings and appropriate regulations, standardize the setup of similar technological assets throughout your organization. Your security team must ensure that all baseline configurations in your environment are documented, that these papers are maintained and up to date, that they are incorporated into your system development process, and that they are enforced across your organization.

4) Remediate Vulnerabilities
This is the process of assessing the vulnerabilities you’ve discovered, assigning risk to them, preparing responses to them, and then logging any activities done to mitigate the vulnerabilities you’ve discovered. Finding flaws and doing nothing about them is pointless and leaves your company vulnerable to a variety of threats.

5) Patch Vulnerabilities
The following is the best way to manage vulnerabilities and patches:

First and foremost, you must have processes in place to identify and validate vulnerabilities utilizing suitable tools and services that will assist you in identifying a potential or confirmed danger to your company.

Next, you analyze your findings in order to thoroughly understand what the risks are. Without genuine knowledge, how can you put the proper measures in place to deal with them? After you’ve completed your analysis, you’ll need to remedy the issues.

Once your “repair” is in place, you must rescan or retest to confirm that it took effect and that it was successful. By following these recommendations, you’ll be well on your way to protecting your company against vulnerabilities and dangers that may cause significant harm if not addressed.

How Do You Manage Vulnerabilities?
The identification of your systems’ vulnerabilities is the first step in the vulnerability management process. You may accomplish this using a variety of scanning programs. It’s critical to conduct these scans on a frequent basis since new vulnerabilities emerge all the time. It’s not simple to stay on top of weaknesses.

According to an ESG poll, keeping up with the number of vulnerabilities is one of the greatest vulnerability management issues for 40% of cybersecurity and IT professionals. Perhaps this is why IT experts claim that submitting a report with thousands of vulnerabilities to the operations team to repair is one of the most prevalent ways to fail at vulnerability management.

Successful vulnerability management methods, they say, involve using sophisticated prioritizing approaches and automated workflow technologies to streamline the handover to the repair team.

Choose Vicarius if you need a cybersecurity tool that can help you build a solid vulnerability remediation guideline. Vicarius is a vulnerability management program aimed towards cybersecurity officers and operators in the United States, as well as IT managers and operators.

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According to a report from NTT | Application Security, the average time it takes for vulnerability management teams to remediate cybersecurity vulnerabilities has increased to 205 days. This implies that vulnerability management and patch management don’t receive the support required for effective security hygiene on a systemic level even in the face of the numerous security breaches that have become a mainstay in the global news.

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Vulnerability management is the continual process of assessing, identifying, managing, remediating, and reporting security vulnerabilities across endpoints, systems, and workloads. Generally, vulnerability management tools help the security team detect vulnerabilities and use different processes to remediate or patch them.

However, a powerful management program employs the knowledge of IT, business operations, and threat intelligence to prioritize vulnerabilities and risks as quickly as possible.

Is There Any Difference Between A Risk, Vulnerability, Or Threat?

According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a vulnerability can be defined as a weakness of an asset or group of assets triggered by one or more threats.

On the other hand, a threat is anything that can capitalize on a vulnerability.

And lastly, risk occurs when a threat triggers vulnerabilities. It is usually damage that can happen when an open vulnerability is exploited by a threat.

Categories and Ranking of Vulnerabilities

Popular cybersecurity organizations use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to communicate and assess the characteristics and severity of software vulnerabilities. Ideally, the CVSS base score has a range of 0.00 to 10.0 but, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) added severity ratings to each CVSS score. The v3.0 of the CVSS scores and its associated ratings are as follows:

CVSS Score Severity Rating

• 0.0 – None
• 0.1-3.9 – Low
• 4.0 -6.9 – Medium
• 7.0-8.9 – High
• 9.0-10.0 – Critical

In addition, NVD provides a routinely updated library that houses common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs), providing the ranking of each vulnerability and other associated information, which includes: product name, vendor, version, etc. The list of Common Vulnerability Exposures originated from the MITRE Corporation. This corporation is a non-profit organization that began documenting CVEs in 1999. It is automatically synced with NVD and provides basic information about each vulnerability.

What are the differences between Vulnerability Assessment and Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability assessment is not the same as vulnerability management; vulnerability management is a recurring process whereas vulnerability assessment is a one-time evaluation of a network or host. Hence, vulnerability assessment is a step in the vulnerability management process.

The stages in the Vulnerability Management Process

Vulnerability programs adhere to different stages of the vulnerability management process. However, the methods are mostly the same even though the terminology varies, but there are other ways to define each step in the process.

Preparation for a Vulnerability Management Program

According to Gartner’s Vulnerability Management Guidance framework, there are five preparation steps before commencing the process. They are:

• Step 1: Ascertain the Scope of the program
• Step 2: Illustrate Roles and Responsibilities
• Step 3: Choose Vulnerability Assessment Tools
• Step 4: Generate and Refine Policy SLAs
• Step 5: Identify context resources and asset

The primary role of this preparation stage is to measure and assess current processes, tools, and resources to identify gaps.

During this preparation, also known as the pre-work stage, security professionals need to ask questions that will help understand the scope of your program. Examples of such questions are:

• Which hosts or assets are most vital to protect?
• What are the assets needed to be measured for vulnerabilities?
• Who will manage such a program? What are their roles and responsibilities?
• What policies or service level agreements (SLAs) do we need to define? How often should an asset be assessed for weak points or vulnerabilities?
• What are the lists of the assets we plan to cover? 
• What are the necessary tools needed to effectively scan or manage our hosts

Once you provide answers to these questions, begin to implement the vulnerability management process.

The 5 steps of the Vulnerability Management Cycle

1. Assess
2. Prioritize
3. Act
4. Reassess
5. Improve

What to look for in Vulnerability Management Solutions

The primary responsibility of a vulnerability manager is to manage exposure to the known vulnerabilities. However, vulnerability management involves more than running a mere scanning tool. A high-quality and efficient toolset is needed to dramatically improve the implementation and the continuous success of any vulnerability program.

There are many options and solutions in the market claiming surpassing qualities, but if you want the best in a vulnerability management solution, here is how to evaluate your options:

Agent size impacts your endpoint performance: More than ever, the major vulnerability vendors in the marketplace lay claims of providing agent-based solutions. Sad to say, most of these agents are bulky, and choosing a bulky tool has an impact on your endpoint’s performance. Hence, before selecting any agent-based tool, make sure you are going for a lightweight agent because it consumes very little space on an endpoint and will minimize the effect on your productivity.

Pay attention to timeliness: One of the vital characteristics of any vulnerability management tool is to detect vulnerabilities in a timely manner. If a tool can’t detect a vulnerability earlier on, it isn’t very useful because it doesn’t contribute to overall protection. A ubiquitous tool that falls under this categorization is the network-based scanner. It takes a long time to complete a scan, using up the organization bandwidth and, in the end, producing outdated information. To avoid this, choose a tool that doesn’t rely on a network but on a lightweight agent.

Immediate and thorough visibility is critical: For maximum security, you should know and see what is vulnerable instantly. Unfortunately, legacy vulnerability tools can hamper your visibility – bulky reports provide little to no help addressing vulnerabilities promptly, scans take a long time and provide outdated results, and bloated agents slow business productivity. The best solution is a scanless technology that allows your team to interact with data in real-time. A scanless technology is always running, identifying vulnerabilities and constantly looking for weaknesses.

For maximum security, organizations no longer need a complicated set of solutions and security tools that requires specialized skills or personnel. Instead, they rely on an integrated platform that provides them with vulnerability management tools and other security tools for detecting threats.

If you need help with scanless vulnerability assessment or vulnerability management, Vicarius is the ideal software to use. Vicarius is a vulnerability management software that targets cybersecurity officers as well IT managers and operators from the U.S. market.

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