How to Implement Risk Based Vulnerability Prioritization in Your IT Environment

Key Points
Need for Vulnerability Prioritization: Describes why prioritizing vulnerabilities by risk is essential when large environments generate more findings than teams can address at once.
What is Risk based Vulnerability Prioritization: Explains how Vulnerability Manager Plus evaluates severity, exploit status, age, patch availability and other parameters to help determine remediation order.
Quick Setup: Provides actionable steps to begin using the built in prioritization capabilities such as filters, CVE search, and the Vulnerability Age Matrix to rank vulnerabilities effectively.

Introduction

IT environments accumulate vulnerabilities quickly, and not all of them pose the same level of risk. Attempting to remediate everything in numerical order wastes time and leaves high impact threats unaddressed. Risk based prioritization helps you focus first on issues with the greatest severity, exploitability and business impact so your remediation efforts deliver the best possible security improvement.

What is Risk Based Vulnerability Prioritization?

Risk based vulnerability prioritization in Vulnerability Manager Plus is the process of ranking vulnerabilities using measurable security factors. The platform considers severity, exploit code availability, vulnerability age, patch availability, zero day status and CVSS scores to help you determine which issues require immediate action. These attributes allow teams to shift from a volume based approach to one that focuses on the vulnerabilities most likely to impact business operations.

Quick Setup

Use the following steps to start applying risk based prioritization methods in Vulnerability Manager Plus.

Step 1: Access the Software Vulnerabilities view

1. Sign in to the Vulnerability Manager Plus console.
2. Go to Threats and select Software Vulnerabilities.
3. Review the full list of detected vulnerabilities across managed devices.

This provides your starting point before applying prioritization filters.

Step 2: Filter vulnerabilities based on risk parameters

1. In the Software Vulnerabilities view, open Filters.<
2. Apply filters for severity, exploit status, patch availability or CVSS score.
3. Apply the filters to narrow down the list to the highest risk vulnerabilities first.
4. Use the filtered results to isolate high risk vulnerabilities quickly.

These filters allow you to refine findings so you can act on the issues with the greatest impact.

To explore how these attributes influence prioritization, you may reference the Vulnerability Assessment and Prioritization guide.

Step 3: Identify specific high priority CVEs

• In Threats → Software Vulnerabilities, use Search by CVE ID.
• Enter the CVE identifier you need to focus on, such as a critical bulletin or mandated fix.
• Review and select the matching vulnerabilities to begin remediation.

This is useful when handling published advisories or business critical exposures.

Step 4: Use the Vulnerability Age Matrix to prioritize long standing risks

1. In the console, go to Dashboard → Home → Vulnerability Age Matrix.
2. Examine how vulnerabilities are grouped according to severity and age.
3. Choose whether the matrix should calculate age from the published date or from the discovered date, depending on your policy.
4. Choose to view age based on published date or discovered date.
5. Select the cell representing older high severity issues to view affected vulnerabilities.

This helps target older, high risk vulnerabilities that may have been overlooked.

Step 5: Review and prioritize zero day vulnerabilities

1. Navigate to Threats → Zero day Vulnerabilities.
2. Examine the dedicated list of zero day vulnerabilities requiring immediate attention.
3. Select entries to initiate remediation through the available actions.

This ensures that emerging threats are ranked at the top of your remediation plan.

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