Preventing cyber breaches by mastering vulnerability prioritization

Prevent breaches through effective vulnerability prioritization

News By Jonathan Gill published 28 October 2024

Today every click, transaction, and digital interaction opens a new door for cyber criminals. Companies are increasingly digitizing their operations, which means a significant expansion of their attack surfaces. One example is the surge in vulnerabilities, with 26,447 disclosed last year alone.

As the total number of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) is projected to rise by 25% in 2024, security teams will find themselves in constant firefighting mode, struggling to manage an overwhelming volume of tickets. But can they realistically keep up with this increase? The constant scrambling to address urgent issues makes it near impossible to prioritize their responses effectively.

With studies indicating that organizations can only remediate between 5% to 20% of vulnerabilities per month. the businesses need an aggregated and contextualized view across all of their security controls to prioritize vulnerabilities. Yet gaining this view is a data science challenge that many security teams are unable to solve.

Jonathan Gill

CEO of Panaseer.

Barriers to effective vulnerability prioritization

To gain a deeper understanding of their risk management programs, many businesses have adopted standard frameworks like CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) and EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System). This approach allows security teams to rank vulnerabilities based on their potential impact and the likelihood of being exploited. But while the principle of prioritization for security teams might seem straightforward, there are several factors that complicate it.

With IT environments constantly evolving, new vulnerabilities pop up all the time and sometimes slip through without being appropriately prioritized. IT is becoming more democratized and spread out, and different departments often roll out their own IT assets without fully understanding the associated security responsibilities – which can let in dangerous “unknown unknowns” through a backdoor. The same is true of the rapidly evolving threat landscape, with emerging attack techniques continually “moving the goalposts”.

On top of this, the cybersecurity skills gap also grew by 12.6% last year, with 4 million additional workers needed to fill the void. This leaves teams stretched thin trying to handle the flood of new vulnerabilities every day. In fact, today 46% of security teams’ time is spent on collecting and reporting security data. That's why it's so important to focus on fixing the high-risk vulnerabilities first, making sure teams use our resources where they count the most.

Critical context considerations

To improve vulnerability prioritization, it's important to aggregate views across multiple controls with business context. This helps with better prioritization, accountability, and teamwork. Businesses should keep in mind:

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