Once you find yourself drowning in a sea of vulnerabilities flagged by countless scans, the pressing task at hand becomes which deficiency to fix first. This complex concern transforms into a far less daunting task when you master the concept of vulnerability prioritization with the utilization of threat intelligence operations.
Lara Meadows, VP of Sales Engineering, recently gave an insightful demo about this imperative process. She shed light on how to connect vulnerability management and threat intelligence to create an effective vulnerability threat library.
Building a Vulnerability Threat Library:
The demo started with a brief introduction to vulnerability management’s lifecycle: discovery, prioritize, verify, and repeat. She then highlighted the importance of integrating threat intelligence into every aspect of security operations.
In the video, Lara explores what it looks like to assist the vulnerability management team using the threat intelligence lifecycle. Every vulnerability management team is very familiar with the need to deal with the rapid increase in threats and this approach tackles that head-on.
Lara recommends starting with the vulnerabilities that are being exploited, especially the ones that could exploit critical assets or financially impact the organizations. This focused approach is to ensure threat intelligence is useful, rich, and relevant for the vulnerability team.
The conducted demo illustrated the step-by-step process of working with a CVE. You start by pulling it into your system, collecting known associated information from credible sources, consolidating that data into a single view, enriching it, analyzing it, and then dispatching it to your team. How you convey this information to your team could range from reports to automated triggering, depending on your specific needs.
ThreatConnect is an aggregator, enricher, analyzer, and action caller. There is an array of sources to feed into ThreatConnect, including companies like FlashPoint, open-source intel feeds, and scans from vulnerability management tools like Tenable and Qualys.
This aggregated, enriched, analyzed intelligence could then be used to perform single or multiple operations. You may want to integrate with your existing ticketing tool or automate it through built-in case management.
Lara explained the process of using ThreatConnect for an efficient, effective, and needed approach to vulnerability management. Prioritizing vulnerabilities based on real-world threats significantly reduces the time to remediate, ensuring a robust cyber defense. Additionally, associating a financial risk score with each vulnerability offering quantifiable insights, further streamlines the prioritization process. Thus, bridging the gap between threat intelligence operations and vulnerability prioritization is the way forward in current threat landscapes.