The first-generation patching process is knee-deep.Decreased employee satisfaction and made weaker offers Web application security Enterprises are finally facing the fact that patching needs to change. Intelligent vulnerability management is revolutionizing the biggest DevSecOps hurdle.
There is a hole in the heart of the patching process
Vulnerabilities can seem like an almost unavoidable part of software development. With the rapid emergence of agile coding, security flaws have become an issue. incessant A component of software that you rely on on a daily basis. In response, vendors issue regular updates to fill in the gaps. Applying these necessary updates (a process called patching) has the sole purpose of cutting out the vulnerable part of the code before it can be exploited by an attacker.
Patching has long been touted as the most important component of technology security. Often described as “doing the basics”, extensive patching is considered the most fundamental security principle offered. While this is definitely true on paper, this principle ignores an important underlying context. Today’s technology stack has evolved into a highly complex and tightly woven web of microservices and supporting APIs.
As the number of software components grows, the demand for traditional patching has grown far beyond immediate implementation. DevSecOps teams are overwhelmed with acres of patch backlogs.
This backlog wreaks havoc on retention rates, creating an environment of constant struggle with little return, while the patching process itself can be highly rewarding. Implementing patches manually is obviously tedious and prone to human error.
Applying a patch can take critical systems offline. Ideally, it should be tested before implementation, but this just adds another black hole in the backlog. Moreover, traditional patches can only be applied to visible IT assets. Maintaining an accurate inventory across large IT assets can be a significant barrier to this.
While cyber threats are growing exponentially, the toxic combination of IT staff shortages and patch piles is quickly creating an impossibility. Faced with this, many DevSecOps teams have scaled back to one of his two stances. The first is to keep trying to patch everything, or at least try to patch as many as possible. The second was even more frustrating for smaller organizations, finding such a task impossible to sustain and almost completely abandoning patching.
Neither strategy is working.the first one is Higher rates of burnout If all patches were given the same amount of TLC, teams would spend a lot of time on relatively minor threats, but potentially never. Avoid lurking monsters. Clearly, the second solution is also quite infeasible. But it’s perfectly understandable, given the increased weight of a huge to-do list.
It may sound extreme for teams to raise their hands and abandon patching altogether, but companies find themselves stuck between increasing ransomware attacks and skyrocketing job dissatisfaction.
Change in vulnerability management
It’s clear that DevSecOps is broken by presenting teams with a never-ending list of vulnerabilities. First-generation vulnerability management is increasingly overwhelming the teams it is supposed to empower. Therefore a complete change is required.
One promising solution is Risk Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM). The heart of this revolution is to better understand and assess the risks of implementing each proposed patch. This intelligent form of patch prioritization helps you cut through low-impact time-wasting bands and instead focus on squashing the really annoying bugs first.
The level of risk presented by each security flaw is calculated via a number of key data points. First, the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) verifies the severity of open source identities and software vulnerabilities. The score provided for each vulnerability within the CVSS program is calculated by the potential severity, urgency, and exploitability of each flaw and ranges from 0.0 to 10.0. Gathering data on vulnerabilities makes it imperative to assess your organization’s own risk and tolerance. Integrated threat intelligence gives you a better understanding of potential malicious attacker targets and behavior.
After establishing the right level of risk tolerance, the DevSecOps team is handed a dynamic, accessible list of real threats.
To take a step towards RBVM, we first need to do asset discovery. Prioritizing patches is less effective when some of your IT assets are in the shadows. A quality security solution provides detailed asset discovery and classification.
Once you have a comprehensive overview, it’s important to clearly establish how your organization ranks and prioritizes risks. This should be synchronized across all stakeholders, especially security and IT operations. Otherwise, the efficiency dictated by RBVM will not be significantly optimized.
When all stakeholders use vulnerability prioritization and tackle the most important ones first, maintenance cycles are greatly reduced. At the same time, RBVM is particularly suitable for automation. Automated collection, contextualization, and prioritization of each vulnerability enables faster, more accurate prioritization and requires fewer resources than manual.
Deploying a streamlined RBVM solution frees DevSecOps from the never-ending drudgery of dealing with endless backlogs. Instead, these teams are empowered to make a real difference to their organizations while paying more attention than ever to the company’s true security stance.
