"Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM)- the process of reducing vulnerabilities across an organization’s attack surface"

Kartik Shahani
Country Manager, Tenable India

Educating customers & employees: Employee awareness regarding the importance of multifactor authentication, software updates including patches, and awareness of phishing and other tactics used by bad actors to access networks is foundational and should not be underestimated. 

However, the onus of ensuring the security of a business lies with the organization. With employees working from home and using personal and work devices - each device, each asset in the infrastructure needs to be considered as potentially becoming rogue.

Therefore security teams need to continue to minimize privileges where necessary and the attack surface to which they have access.

A lot of the issues organizations are facing are simple foundational things that they’re not doing well such as patching. By and large, the MO for most cybercriminals — whether they be rogue actors or state-sponsored — is the path of least resistance: they’re getting in through known but unpatched vulnerabilities. Security teams within organizations need to get the basics right, address vulnerability patching diligently and implement the right security controls.

Mitigating threat situation: To avoid falling victim to ransomware, organizations need to implement security awareness training and a risk-based vulnerability management program. Security awareness training can help thwart the threats posed by malicious spam and phishing attacks. When it comes to vulnerabilities, it is crucial to observe that with the number of vulnerability disclosures constantly climbing, keeping on top of them can seem insurmountable.

Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) is the process of reducing vulnerabilities across an organization’s attack surface by prioritizing remediation efforts based on risk. Put simple, RBVM is about understanding vulnerability risk in the context of threat and business impact. By focusing on the vulnerabilities that are both dangerous and likely to be exploited, organizations can make the best use of their resources and increase the return on their risk management investments.

Safeguarding customers & employees: Most remote workers have a variety of connected devices such as smart television sets, doorbells, baby monitors and more in their homes in addition to their laptops and tablets. This means that every time a remote employee logs into their laptop, each of those devices becomes part of the enterprise attack surface. Since security teams won't be able to run network vulnerability scans of personal devices, installing local vulnerability detection agents to provide off-network visibility is beneficial. Risk can also be mitigated by adding IT systems management onto laptops so that the security team can control software updates and patching. This is a simple, but effective strategy.