Businesses rely heavily on technology to run operations, store data, and communicate with customers. This digital dependency makes them a prime target for cyberattacks, where cybercriminals can exploit vulnerabilities in their IT infrastructure. Vulnerability management, the continuous process of identifying, assessing, and remediating security weaknesses, is critical to maintaining a strong security posture.

However, many organizations need help with effective vulnerability management due to various challenges. In this blog, we’ll discuss eight key challenges businesses face in vulnerability management and explore effective solutions to mitigate the risks.

Vulnerability management does not only merely scan and patch vulnerable systems. It’s about learning the specifics of every weakness and knowing how to act to avoid giving a hacker a chance to crack into a given system. Today’s hackers actively look for vulnerabilities in systems and networking to exploit loopholes and compromise security to gain access to customer information or paralyze businesses. Therefore, vulnerability management can help organizations minimize the attack surface and exposure to threats and enable the organization to fix the vulnerability before being exploited. Failing to achieve this leads to loss of valuable data, financial losses, and severe reputational losses in organizations.

Organizations’ common challenges are updating and managing their asset inventory and internal information on tangible and intangible company assets such as systems, software, cloud services, and mobiles. This means that whenever a system is out of the SID spotlight, its shortcomings cannot be ascertained as well.

Solution:

Analyzing the IT environment can be simplified using automated tools to identify an organization’s assets. These tools run in the background and identify both new and previous devices connected to the network, so no asset goes unnoticed, and no loophole in unidentified systems is discovered. The first step in vulnerability management is to ensure that the organization has an accurate and updated register of assets.

New vulnerabilities are identified daily, making it difficult for security teams to determine which to act on first. It is important to distinguish that not all vulnerabilities have the same potential: some could pose virtually minimal risk when attacked yet would turn immensely dangerous if targeted.

Solution:

A risk-based approach to vulnerability management is required. Figures that provide information about the likelihood of an exploit, the possible consequences, and the business risk of vulnerabilities enable one to distinguish between the most dangerous threats. Combined with threat intelligence, the CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) plays an important part in deciding what vulnerabilities require attention from the organization.

Most organizations require additional manpower, time, or capacity to fix all the identified flaws. This challenge is especially acute in large enterprise organizations with many systems and applications.

Solution:

One of the most critical differentiators can be patch management automation to overcome this. Patch management solutions help organizations act independently on the fixes for critical vulnerabilities without requiring much manual intervention. Concerning the timing of patching activities, the quintessential frameworks implemented essential planning on critical organizational systems and set usual patching slots to guarantee that threats covered are handled orderly without burdening the IT groups.

Old systems still support old software that cannot be upgraded or can only be upgraded with significant challenges. While these systems are probably critical to the organization, their security threat level is high because their vendor no longer provides updates.

Solution:

It will be advisable for organizations to consider moving from older platforms to new ones that come with updates on security for frequent updates. Where this isn’t possible, then using other controls like network segmentation, isolating older systems from the rest of the network, and using virtual patches can be of great help while waiting for the system to be replaced or upgraded

Configuration errors, such as open ports, weak passwords, and wrong security settings, can create many vulnerable points. These misconfigurations arise from mistakes made during system configuration or system tuning.

Solution:

It should be noted that in order to achieve effective configuration management, one should periodically conduct configuration audits and use automation tools in security configuration management (SCM). Furthermore, continued education of personnel on the best practices and procedures will minimize the chances of them unknowingly causing vulnerability.

Dependence on third parties for essential services and software is a common practice in organizations. Nonetheless, these external parties can introduce gaps into the organization’s IT landscape that may not be noticed initially until fully exploited.

Solution:

There is a need for a strong third-party risk management program in place. Some of this should involve screening vendors on security measures adopted, conducting security audits on Third-Party systems, and including clauses on security compliance in contracts. Also, the organization must provide guidelines on security patching schedules, and third-party compliance must report any vulnerabilities that might impact an organization’s systems.

In many organizations, vulnerability management denotes several tools used to scan, patch, and report. These tools tend to interact with one another, causing workflow hitches and full-proof gaps in the process.

Solution:

All these tools can be managed through integrated vulnerability management, which has the added advantage of making workflows efficient. Other tools that can assist with this process include security orchestration and automation tools, which can also help manage responses based on the identified vulnerabilities so that patching, reporting, and remediation are all components of the same process.

The threats in the cybersecurity environment are dynamic. Some new vulnerabilities appear every day, and hackers never cease to develop new ways to penetrate them.

Solution:

The ability to monitor for threats and consume real-time threat intelligence is the key to combating newly discovered vulnerabilities or threats. Organizations should shift to reactive mode by periodically scanning for the most trending vulnerabilities and ensuring they update themselves with any threats that may be in the feeds.

Risk management is one of the most critical components of company security, but we know it has issues. From the absence of visibility of assets to scarce resources to remediate vulnerabilities effectively, such organizations face these challenges to secure their environment. However, The above difficulties can be addressed through automation, a risk-based approach, tool integration, and continuous monitoring to minimize exposure to Cyber risks.

Vulnerability management cannot be a one-off project, as one has to adapt to new risks appearing in the environment. It is crucial to conduct assessments frequently, patch vulnerabilities when necessary, and monitor threats to reduce the chances of acquiring a breach or an attack. Vulnerability management is an activity that goes beyond simple technical solutions; it is a business imperative.