What is Risk-based Vulnerability Management (RBVM)?

What are the differences between RBVM and Traditional Vulnerability Management?

Contrary to traditional vulnerability management, where all the vulnerabilities are discovered and mitigated almost equally, RBVM prioritizes and mitigates the vulnerabilities based on the severity of the damage they pose in case of exploitation.

Here's a summary of the differences between risk-based vulnerability management and its traditional counterpart.

What are the Limitations of Traditional Vulnerability Management?

Traditional vulnerability management has been the go-to process for IT admins and security enthusiasts for over two decades. However, with the rapidly evolving threat landscape, the conventional vulnerability management process soon turned out to be ineffective in thwarting ransomware and cyberattacks.

Here are some of its limitations:

• Volume overload: Every month, thousands of vulnerabilities are discovered, many with "high" severity, based on CVSS. However, the majority of the vulnerabilities are less likely to be exploited. Hence, the sheer amount of vulnerabilities when left for mitigation without proper prioritization overloads the IT teams.
• Lack of context: Leveraging traditional vulnerability scanning tools may often lead to vulnerabilities being listed without the context of real-world threat activity or business importance, making risk estimation highly inaccurate.
• Inefficient usage of resources: Without vulnerability prioritization, remediation efforts aren't solely focused on fixing the most severe ones. Rather, they are diluted while mitigating thousands of other vulnerabilities, leading to wastage of workforce and time.

What are the Key Components of Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?

Risk-based vulnerability management isn't just another out-of-the-box feature. Instead, it is a combination of multiple components and functionalities that work simultaneously to detect, identify, and prioritize vulnerabilities in the network.

Step-by-Step Guide on the Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Process

Creating an efficient RBVM process in the organization first requires setting a structured vulnerability management flow. Each step in the workflow plays a crucial role in discovering, classifying, and prioritizing the assets for mitigation.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to build one in your organization:

• Create an asset inventory to map all assets (on-premise and cloud), including existing data, their location, and other relevant ownership details.
• Classify assets based on business criticality, data sensitivity, regulatory requirements, and other relevant factors. This helps define the critical assets and understand the extent of the damage if essential assets are compromised.
• Conduct a vulnerability assessment via automated vulnerability scanning tools and configuration checks. Furthermore, gather threat intelligence by actively monitoring third-party feeds to understand which vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild.
• Allocate risk scores and prioritize vulnerabilities by utilizing risk models and incorporating predictive analytics to forecast vulnerabilities that are likely to be exploited.
• Strategize remediation and mitigation with immediate patching, temporary workarounds, and compensating controls. Additionally, assign ownerships and set SLAs for compliance.
• Monitor and re-evaluate the risk model as newer threats emerge, assets within the network change, and patches are released. This helps IT teams prepare for the ever-changing nature of threats.
• Measure KPIs such as Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) vulnerabilities, risk exposure status, and cost savings to understand the ROI from the RBVM process.

What are the Challenges in RBVM and How to Overcome Them?

Implementing a risk-based vulnerability management process within an organization presents its own set of challenges, risks, and constraints. Below, we have summarized some of the common difficulties in RBVM and guided how administrators can overcome them.

Challenge 1: Asset visibility gaps arising from unmanaged and unmonitored assets and BYODs. These can pave the way for threat actors to compromise the network.

Solution: Using automated discovery tools that integrate their asset management and continuous scanning can provide in-depth monitoring of the network.

Challenge 2: Obsolete data quality and inaccurate information about assets, as well as misconfigured tools, can render risk assessment highly inaccurate.

Solution: Updating asset data regularly and conducting scheduled asset scans ensures that the data remains current and accurate.

Challenge 3: Organizational silos, such as a lack of visibility on the status of the assets between the ITOps and SecOps teams, can cause delays in prioritization, mitigation, and decision-making.

Solution: Leveraging vulnerability management software with a unified console can provide visibility to multiple teams at once. Additionally, creating cross-functional teams and setting SLAs can further enhance the process.

Challenge 4: Remediation backlogs and multiple high-severity vulnerabilities can still be confusing, even after prioritization has been applied.

Solution: Utilizing automated tools wherever possible, along with adequately staffing resources or outsourcing responsibilities, can help streamline functions.

Challenge 5: Implementing change management and introducing risk-based prioritization can have a backlash if the IT teams are accustomed to a "patching everything" mindset.

Solution: Employee training, demonstrating results of risk-based prioritization, and gradually integrating the RBVM process can allow greater acceptance.

Best Practices for an Effective Risk-based Vulnerability Management Process

• Regularly update the asset inventory, including software, IoT devices, and cloud instances.
• Frequently revalidate the risk scoring model and vulnerability prioritization methods based on the nature of emerging threats and cyberattacks.
• Leverage automated scanning tools to accelerate the scanning process and prevent manual errors.
• Establish feedback loops and thorough checks after remediation to monitor whether the attacks are recurring.
• Align the RBVM KPIs with business goals to help measure the ROI. Some of the relevant KPIs are adherence to compliance, amount of downtime averted, and financial loss prevented.
• Educate teams on the vulnerability management tool being used, risk scoring metrics, and the importance of prioritization.

FAQs on Risk-based Vulnerability Management

1. What is risk-based vulnerability management?

Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) is the practice of identifying, prioritizing, and remediating security flaws based on the risk they pose to an organization, rather than treating all vulnerabilities equally.

2. What is the primary purpose of a risk-based approach to prioritizing vulnerabilities?

The risk-based vulnerability management approach focuses on vulnerabilities that present the most significant business risk, ensuring faster remediation of threats most likely to be exploited.

3. How does risk-based vulnerability management differ from traditional vulnerability management?

Traditional vulnerability management ranks issues primarily by severity scores, such as CVSS, whereas RBVM combines severity with exploitability, asset value, and business impact to drive smarter prioritization.

4. What are the key steps in risk-based vulnerability management?

The core steps are creating an asset inventory and classifying the threats, conducting a vulnerability assessment, allocating risk scores, strategizing remediation, monitoring the mitigation process, and measuring the KPIs.

5. What is VPR (Vulnerability Priority Rating) in vulnerability management?

VPR is a dynamic score that estimates the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited in the wild, allowing organizations to prioritize threats more effectively than static severity scores.

6. How does risk-based prioritization work in vulnerability management?

It works by combining threat intelligence, exploit data, asset criticality, and vulnerability severity to assign a business-risk level to each issue, guiding remediation priorities.

7. What are the four pillars of risk-based vulnerability management?

The four pillars are: comprehensive asset visibility, contextual vulnerability assessment, threat intelligence integration, and prioritized remediation.

8. What are the benefits of adopting a risk-based vulnerability management approach?

RBVM improves remediation efficiency, reduces attack surface, aligns security with business goals, and enables teams to defend against the most likely and damaging threats first.

About the author

Anupam Kundu is a Product Specialist at ManageEngine in the Unified Endpoint Management and Security suite. With a background in digital marketing, his expertise includes creating technical and long-form content for SEO and user education in the IT and cybersecurity domain.