My team and I have spoken with a number of analysts and have confirmed that the plethora of vulnerability assessment solutions on the market share a common trait and a common flaw, the shear volume of reports that can be created based on a vulnerability assessment. Every scan can lead to a myriad of hosts and vulnerabilities that need remediation and pages upon pages of work for another team to execute upon. This is where Unified Vulnerability Management plugs into a remediation process. In some organizations, this process is a paper based report (or PDF) forwarded to the server or desktop administration team to apply security patches or a process of opening help desk tickets to various team members to perform remediation. Both of which is very labor intensive. Some organizations have embarked on patch management integration to streamline the process and others believe in a separate and distinct separation of duties.
The process regardless of the internal procedures to pass data generally looks like this:
An assessment finds the vulnerability, something or someone mitigates the security risk, the risk is verified remediated, and final reports trend the progress over time. The labor intensive process occurs between the first two steps as volumes of reports are produced and an administrator must decipher them to apply the appropriate patch and ultimately deploy it using tools or even "sneaknet" for all affected systems.
This is where eEye can help. eEye's Unified Vulnerability Management approach considers the vulnerability assessment and patch mitigation as in an integrated step in the process. Users can go from vulnerability identification to patch deployment in one easy step with complete role based access and without the need for lengthy reports and manual procedures. In fact, this integrated process also includes protection against threats even if the patch is not deployed. Below is a screenshot directly from the Retina CS management console that highlights this functionality:
Essentially, eEye has plugged the remediation process directly into vulnerability assessment. This removes the burden that analysts and users agree upon. How to shorten the time from vulnerability identification, report generation, and patch mitigation to nearly day zero with out the need for tons of reports and manual intervention. Environments with strict segregation of responsibilities can also benefit from this approach due to the unique role based capabilities built into the solution.
For more information on how eEye can help integrate your remediation process directly into vulnerability assessment, please click here.
Morey J. Haber, Chief Security Officer, BeyondTrust
Morey J. Haber is the Chief Security Officer at BeyondTrust. He has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has authored three books: Privileged Attack Vectors, Asset Attack Vectors, and Identity Attack Vectors. He is a founding member of the industry group Transparency in Cyber, and in 2020 was elected to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) Executive Advisory Board. Morey currently oversees BeyondTrust security and governance for corporate and cloud based solutions and regularly consults for global periodicals and media. He originally joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the eEye Digital Security acquisition where he served as a Product Owner and Solutions Engineer since 2004. Prior to eEye, he was Beta Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. He began his career as Reliability and Maintainability Engineer for a government contractor building flight and training simulators. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
