[By Lydia Zhang, President and Co-founder of Ridge Security]
Organizations face constant threats from vulnerabilities that can exploit their systems and compromise sensitive data. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are one such concern, posing significant risks to organizations of all sizes.
Adopting a comprehensive security framework like continuous threat management helps to mitigate these threats effectively. So, let’s explore how this helps protect organizations from CVEs and fortifies their security posture.
Before diving into the role of continuous threat management, it is essential to grasp the basic concept of CVEs. CVEs are publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities and exposures that are assigned unique identifiers. They can exist in software, hardware, or network components, making them prime targets for cybercriminals to exploit weaknesses and gain unauthorized access.
The Role of Continuous Threat Management
Continuous threat management is a comprehensive security framework that combines threat intelligence, event management, and proactive monitoring and testing to strengthen an organization’s security posture. Here’s how it plays a crucial role in protecting against CVEs.
Threat Intelligence – Intelligence feeds gather information about emerging vulnerabilities and threats, including CVEs. By continuously monitoring reputable sources such as vulnerability databases, security bulletins, and threat intelligence platforms, organizations are informed about the latest CVEs relevant to their systems. This early awareness enables proactive measures to address vulnerabilities promptly. By generating reports and visualizations, security teams can track vulnerabilities, patch progress, and identify patterns or trends related to CVEs.
Vulnerability Assessment – Conducted across an organization’s infrastructure, applications, and network components, these assessments identify known CVEs and assess their potential impact on the organization’s systems. By performing comprehensive vulnerability scans and analyzing and validating the results, remediation efforts can be prioritized to eliminate the risk and impact of exploitation.
Patch Management – This process facilitates the deployment of security patches, updates, and fixes for identified vulnerabilities and exposures across the organization’s systems. Automated patch management tools integrated within the continuous threat management framework ensure timely patch application, reducing the window of opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit CVEs.
Incident Detection and Response – Continuously monitoring network traffic, logs, and security events will reveal any signs of exploitation related to CVEs. Continuous threat management identifies potential attacks and alerts security teams by correlating security events and applying behavioral analysis. Rapid incident detection and response minimizes the impact of CVE-related incidents.
Empowering Organizations to Unlock Operational Efficiencies
Advanced correlation and analysis allow security teams to identify patterns, anomalies, and indicators of compromise in real-time. With streamlined incident response workflows and automated alerts, continuous threat management platforms enable organizations to respond swiftly and effectively to mitigate the impact of CVE-related incidents.
A common platform for collaboration promotes cross-functional coordination, enhancing operational efficiencies and ensuring that security tasks are effectively executed. Security teams can easily share critical information, track vulnerability management progress, and monitor the status of patches and configuration changes. Continuous monitoring, testing, validating, and applying patches promptly enable organizations to adhere to security best practices and support regulatory requirements.
Designed to scale with the organization’s needs as they grow and face new threats, continuous threat management accommodates increased data volumes, expands monitoring capabilities, and integrates with other security tools. This scalability ensures that operational efficiencies gained are sustained over time and aligned with the organization’s evolving security requirements.
Security Validation Platforms Support Continuous Threat Management
Today’s new generation of AI-powered security validation platforms stands at the forefront of proactive security measures, offering a dynamic and continuous cycle of testing, validation, prioritization, and resolution of vulnerabilities and exposures.
At the heart of AI-powered security validation is automated penetration testing. By thoroughly scanning an organization’s network to identify and exploit vulnerabilities, it mimics the tactics of actual cyber attackers. Adeptly uncovering threats, such as software flaws, unauthorized command executions, credentials exposure, distributed denial of services attacks, sensitive data leakage, and database intrusions, it provides tangible proof of attack consequences and executes automated remediation. The result is a set of risk assessment reports that are both prioritized and accurate – with zero false positives.
Comprehensive reporting can include intricate details such as the attack structure, the specific pathways taken, the exposed surfaces, and the particulars of the vulnerabilities and risks involved, with actionable solutions for each identified issue. These platforms can also shed light on the mechanics of the attack, providing insights into the payloads used, exploit codes, and snapshots of the attack in progress.
Beyond mere detection, cybersecurity risk management and governance are elevated to new heights, empowering organizations to bolster their defenses and resilience by supplying critical data and guidance on cybersecurity risk management, strategic planning, and governance. This can include detailed information on each vulnerability and risk, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score, severity ranking, descriptions, and references.
AI-powered security validation can go further by suggesting specific remediation strategies, whether patching, updating, reconfiguring, or encrypting, to address and mitigate each identified risk. Insights can be provided into the network’s security policies, rules, and configurations and how to enhance them using state-of-the-art reinforcement learning techniques and sophisticated algorithms.
Shielding Organizations from CVEs
A continuous threat management security framework helps organizations protect themselves from CVEs that cybercriminals can exploit. By deploying technology such as security validation with automated penetration testing, they can significantly improve operational efficiencies, collaboration, and compliance by using threat intelligence, vulnerability assessment, automated patch management, and incident detection and response. Their security posture is strengthened by identifying, prioritizing, and remediating CVEs across the organization’s digital systems.
About the author
Lydia Zhang is the President and Co-founder of Ridge Security. She holds an impressive entrepreneurial-focused resume that includes 20 years of leadership roles in network and cyber security. Lydia leads a Silicon Valley cybersecurity startup that develops automated penetration testing with the goal of delivering innovative security technologies to all. Prior to founding Ridge Security, Zhang held Senior Vice President and Product Management roles at Hillstone Networks and Cisco Systems. She holds a double Master’s, MA, and MS from USC and a degree from Tsinghua University in Biomedical Engineering.
