Context Is King: From Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management

Vulnerability management remains a cornerstone of preventive cybersecurity, but organizations still struggle with vulnerability overload and sophisticated threats. Tenable’s new Exposure Signals gives security teams comprehensive context, so they can shift from vulnerability management to exposure management and effectively prioritize high-risk exposures across their complex attack surface.

A critical vulnerability has been disclosed and attackers worldwide are actively exploiting it in the wild. Your vulnerability management team jumps into action and determines that the vulnerability is present in hundreds of your organization’s assets. Which ones do you patch first? How do you prioritize your remediation efforts? What criteria do you use? The clock is ticking. Hackers are on the prowl.

Historically, your vulnerability management team would rely on severity scores like Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR). This is a great start, but only gives you one indicator of risk. To prioritize remediation precisely and effectively, you need to consider a variety of other criteria, such as a vulnerable asset’s type, owner, and function; the access-level and privileges on the asset; and critical attack paths into your environment.

This type of comprehensive, holistic context will let you prioritize correctly, but it can only be achieved with a different approach that goes beyond traditional vulnerability management. That approach is exposure management. 

With exposure management, your vulnerability management team would be able to pinpoint the subset of assets affected by our hypothetical vulnerability that, for example, are externally accessible, possess domain-level privileges and are part of a critical attack path. That way they would know where the greatest risk is and what they need to remediate first. Having this deep insight, context and visibility transforms the risk assessment equation, and allows your vulnerability management team to move decisively, quickly and strategically.

In this blog, we’ll outline why it’s imperative for your vulnerability management teams to shift to an exposure management mindset, and we’ll explain how Tenable can help them do it.

To pinpoint riskiest vulns, vulnerability management needs broader exposure context 

In today's evolving cybersecurity landscape, vulnerability management remains one of the foundational pieces of an organization's proactive defense strategy. However, these teams still have difficulty in addressing the increased level of risks posed by the continuous surge of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and other flaws.

Many security teams are frequently overwhelmed by the sheer volume of vulnerabilities with limited resources to manage them effectively. The sophistication and speed of threat actors has escalated, with attackers having more entry points and using new tactics, techniques and procedures to access other critical areas of the business - demonstrating that attacks are no longer linear but multifaceted.

It’s common for security teams to struggle with:

• Vulnerability overload - This long-standing problem keeps getting worse. Security teams are finding it more difficult than ever to sift through the avalanche of CVEs and identify the areas of the business that have the most risk.
   
•  Lack of exposure context for prioritization - Your teams are making decisions while missing layers of context. Threat intelligence and vulnerability severity are a great start, but limiting yourself to them doesn’t give you the full context you need to prioritize properly. 
   
• Slow remediation response - Both proactive and reactive security teams devote massive amounts of time to responding to critical vulnerabilities. Resources are spread thin, making it more important than ever for teams to confidently identify the most high risk exposures when recommending remediation efforts.

Need to shift from a vulnerability to an exposure mindset

Knowing the struggles that you are dealing with today can help illuminate the benefits of exposure management. The missing links between a vulnerability and an exposure are the additional layers of context. Having multidimensional context enables you to understand not just the vulnerabilities themselves but their potential impact within the broader attack surface. This approach provides a more comprehensive view of an organization's security posture by considering factors such as threat intelligence, asset criticality, identities and access, as well as other pieces of context. With this additional information, you spend significantly less time sorting through stacks of similar vulnerabilities and you can be more focused on identifying key issues that pose risk - exposures.

For those who have never heard of exposure management or are just getting started, there are many benefits to this discipline. When it comes to Tenable’s approach, we adopt that same mentality with our exposure management platform. The goal is simple: exposure management empowers organizations to prioritize remediation efforts more effectively. It surfaces information that helps develop strategies to address not only the vulnerabilities themselves but the emergence of exposures that could lead to significant breaches.

The jump from vulnerability to exposure

Bridging the gap from vulnerability management to exposure management requires connecting context across the entire attack surface. Vulnerability management provides context that predicts the likelihood of an attack and displays key drivers, age of vulnerability and threat sources. These attributes are helpful, but we can go much further to improve our prioritization effectiveness. This requires having broader visibility and deeper insights across the attack surface to understand the bigger picture of exposures.

Specifically, security teams need additional context around:

• Asset context - There are many levels to an asset that can help drive prioritization decisions. It’s key to understand the criticality of an asset related to its type, function, owner name and its relationships to other assets. Even knowing if the asset is accessible from the internet or not will shape how its remediation is prioritized.
   
• Identities - Identities serve as the cornerstone for successful attacks, so it’s key to contextualize them for exposure management. Understanding user-privilege levels, entitlements and user information can help prevent attackers from gaining privilege escalation and moving laterally. Focusing prioritization efforts on vulnerable assets with domain and admin-level privileges is a critical best practice in order to reduce the likelihood of a breach.
   
• Threat context - Having various levels of threat context is also important to prioritize exposures. We know that threats change over time, so leveraging dynamic scoring like VPR or Asset Exposure Score (AES) can show indicators of risk. We can also bring in context from attack path modeling to influence remediation decisions based on the attacker’s perspective by understanding the number of critical attack paths or choke points in your environment.

When security analysts have this additional information, they can now truly understand the breadth and depth of the exposure. This is how prioritization is done in this new world of exposure management.

Introducing Exposure Signals

To help make it easier for you to shift to this exposure management mindset, we have developed a new prioritization capability called Exposure Signals. Available in Tenable One, Tenable’s exposure management platform, Exposure Signals allows security teams to have more comprehensive context in a centralized place for a focused view of risk. 

There are two ways to use these new Exposure Signals. The first is to access a comprehensive library of high-risk, prebuilt signals. Easy to refer to, they signal potential risk in your environment and create a great starting point for you to get your exposure management juices flowing. For example, you can easily see and refer to: 

• Domain admin group on internet-exposed hosts with critical vulnerabilities
• Devices exposed to the internet via RDP with an associated identity account with a compromised password
• Cloud assets with critical severity findings and asset exposure score above 700

Exposure Signals allow you to track the number of violations that signal high-risk scenarios in your environment. View this list on a regular basis to see how it changes over time with its unique trendline. Take exploration into your own hands by viewing the impacted asset and its contextual intelligence in our Inventory Module. 

The second way to use Exposure Signals is by creating your own signals using a query builder or natural language processing (NLP) search powered by ExposureAI. That way, you can go as broad or as precise as needed. For example, let’s say there is a new zero day vulnerability that sweeps the industry, similar to Log4Shell. You can easily create a signal to target which assets have the vulnerability, are internet facing and have domain admin-level privileges. We are stringing these components together so that you can understand your true risk and better direct your prioritization efforts.

To learn more about Tenable One and Exposure Signals, check out our interactive demo: