Vulnerability Prioritization Technology

Vulnerability Prioritization Technology

Vulnerability prioritization technology (VPT) streamlines the vulnerability analysis and mitigation process by identifying and prioritizing the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest organizational risks. The approach considers the exploitability of a vulnerability, asset or business-criticality, the severity of a vulnerability, and compensating controls in place. VPT supports a risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) approach. VPT products and services utilize telemetry from vulnerability assessment (VA) tools, configuration management databases (CMDBs), and application security testing (AST). VPT adds a layer of intelligence by leveraging analytics and various threat and vulnerability intelligence sources.

VPT automation leverages analytics and vulnerability intelligence to reduce the human resource requirements of performing manual RBVM. The rise in security incidents and breaches is pushing organizations to adopt VPT solutions to obtain effective, efficient vulnerability management programs. VPT identifies more pragmatic risks to the organization and helps prioritize actions for vulnerability treatment — whether via remediation (e.g., patching) and/or compensating controls (e.g., intrusion prevention system [IPS] and web application firewall (WAF).

Organizations switch to VPT when they need to prioritize dynamic vulnerabilities, when predefined, or static Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores no longer reflect the real score to the organization. VPT solutions analyze vulnerabilities in the context of the current threat landscape. A low-risk vulnerability today might be a high-risk vulnerability tomorrow because of dynamic changes made by attackers, while the CVSS score would remain relatively static.

Ridge Security VPT support  

As part of an integrated VPT, Ridge Security’s RidgeBot^® prioritizes “risks” defined as the successful exploits of vulnerabilities and highly recommend users prioritize the vulnerabilities that cause risks versus others. RidgeBot^® enables organizations to frequently and consistently test their infrastructure, applications, and defenses to find and mitigate weaknesses, gaps and operational deficiencies faster. RidgeBot^® acts like human attackers using sophisticated exploits. RidgeBot^® relentlessly locates exploits across an enterprise network, document their findings, continuously measure results and effectiveness, and verify vulnerabilities.

RidgeBot^® enables organizations to conduct automated pentesting from an attacker’s point of view. Before exposures are put into production, RidgeBot^® finds, assesses, prioritizes, and fixes a wide set of exposures before bad actors get to them. The resulting validation allows organizations to see what would happen in the event of an attack, how their defenses would cope, and how well the processes would perform.