Vulnerability Management: New Year, Same Story

It may be a new year, but 2020 didn’t wait long to remind us that it’s still business as usual in the world of critical security vulnerabilities. January already saw critical vulnerabilities in a wide range of products. This impacted hundreds of thousands of organizations. The vulnerabilities ranged from remote code execution to authentication bypass, cryptographic spoofing to arbitrary code execution. 

That represents a wide breadth of impacted software. Not only that, but many of the weaknesses that have been uncovered are urgent. This deeply stresses that every organization should continue to place importance on vulnerability management, centralized patching and configuration management.

Vulnerability Management is a Challenge

Organizations face massive challenges as they work to keep their users, data and networks secure from external threats. For example, patching is an intricate set of moving parts with knowledge and technology dependencies. You must first have consistent and effective knowledge of the full set of software being leveraged across your organization’s endpoints and servers.

Once you have that understanding, you must still maintain a current and accurate awareness of the vulnerabilities and threats that are unique to each part of a system. Finally, you need a program in place to allow for the automated installation of requisite patches on vulnerable endpoints. 

Keeping Your Software Patched

Centralized configuration and vulnerability management are a must for building the knowledge needed to keep your software patched. Tools like vulnerability scanners can help uncover hidden cracks in your security armor in ways that other tools can miss. They can look around every corner and check IP by IP in your environment.

Configuration management tools can be used to generate a realistic inventory of installed software. This will help identify the most prevalent vulnerabilities in your environment, allowing for quick remediation against the largest possible subset of exploits.

These tasks can quickly stack up. They can add to the complexity, time and effort — and result in a goal that may seem almost impossible to achieve. 

Get Help From the Experts

At ivision, we have repeatedly seen the value of an effective patching and vulnerability management program. As a result, we are driven to help companies reach their goals. If your organization is looking to implement or streamline a configuration management program, vulnerability management program, or has a need for tools to help you more effectively manage your server or endpoint patching — please reach out. We will be happy to assist.