As digital threats become more frequent and sophisticated, cybersecurity teams must focus on vulnerability remediation more than ever. Vulnerability remediation is one of the most important steps in the vulnerability management process.
If you don’t remediate vulnerabilities, threat actors can easily exploit them through various endpoints—leading to data theft, financial losses, reputational damage, regulatory penalties, and a lower bottom line.
Vulnerability remediation involves finding, fixing, and neutralizing security vulnerabilities in your IT environment to minimize the attack surface. It is the front line of defence against cyber attacks and has several objectives:
Common vulnerabilities found during remediation include misconfigured systems, outdated software, and flaws in application code.
People often use the terms vulnerability remediation and vulnerability management interchangeably. However, they are distinct concepts.
Vulnerability remediation is when cybersecurity teams fix vulnerabilities that have already been identified. It may mean updating software, applying a security patch, or reconfiguring a system.
For instance, if your vulnerability scanning program reveals that one of your servers is running an outdated version of OpenSSL, your cybersecurity team can perform vulnerability remediation by updating OpenSSL to the latest secure release.
Vulnerability management, in contrast, is a continuous, systemic process of spotting, assessing, and addressing vulnerabilities across your IT environment. The main goal of a vulnerability management program is to identify and resolve the most critical vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
The main challenge is determining which vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk. Once cybersecurity teams have prioritized which vulnerabilities to address, they can effectively allocate time, resources, and personnel.
To illustrate how vulnerability management works, suppose your company runs a weekly vulnerability scan and detects multiple issues, including a critical vulnerability in a public server. The security team triages the findings, prioritizes the public server vulnerability due to its exposure and severity, and assigns it to the IT team. The team applies a security patch within 24 hours. They then run a verification scan to confirm the fix and document the resolution for audit and compliance purposes.
This is just one cycle in the ongoing vulnerability management process. The team repeats the process every week to protect your company’s IT environment.
The vulnerability remediation process can be organized into several key steps that mirror the vulnerability management process.
However, unlike vulnerability management, which is ongoing and done consistently according to schedule, vulnerability remediation is only done once to address specific issues (i.e., after spotting a particular problem).
Here’s a breakdown of the vulnerability remediation process with practical insights for cybersecurity teams:
The first step is to locate vulnerabilities like software misconfiguration and inadequate code. Security teams can do this through automated regular scans and manual code reviews.
After identifying the vulnerabilities, the team engages in exposure assessment. In other words, they measure or estimate the intensity, frequency, and duration of exposure to vulnerabilities. Then, the cybersecurity team performs exposure validation, which determines the real-world exploitability of identified vulnerabilities by simulating cyberattacks to test the effectiveness of security controls.
Next, the team uses the results from exposure validation to prioritize and focus remediation efforts on the most dangerous vulnerabilities. Several standards help teams prioritize mitigating vulnerabilities, including NIST’s NVD and MITRE’s Common Vulnerability and Exposures Systems (CVE).
Each vulnerability is assigned to relevant teams, such as IT, AppSec, or DevOps. Each team creates a plan to fix or mitigate the issues.
Team members implement fixes through patching, mitigation strategies, or reconfiguration.
Team members perform rescans to confirm whether the vulnerabilities have been resolved.
Team members create documentation for internal tracking and compliance audits.
After identifying vulnerabilities, cybersecurity teams must prioritize them during remediation. This involves assessing and ranking identified security vulnerabilities based on various factors, including the following.
The severity of a vulnerability reflects its potential impact on the application or system. Cybersecurity staff usually measure this using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which provides a standardized way to determine and rate the severity of a vulnerability.
Note, however, that CVSS scores should only be one part of your vulnerability prioritization process. Vulnerabilities with low ratings can often chain together to compromise an application or network.
This is the likelihood that a threat actor will exploit a vulnerability. Exploitability can depend on factors such as the resources and skills needed to exploit the vulnerability, the availability of exploit code, and the attackers’ potential gains.
This is the potential damage a vulnerability can cause if exploited. Business impact damage may include reputational damage, data loss, financial loss, or system downtime. The extent of the damage depends on the organization’s overall security posture and the specific data and systems affected.
Security teams should also consider the total asset information or business context of a vulnerability. That is, how a vulnerability can affect an organization’s goals and regulatory compliance requirements. This information is vital for ranking vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities with a higher chance of affecting your goals or compliance requirements (such as ransomware) should be ranked higher than vulnerabilities with limited impact.
Threat intelligence allows security teams to spot vulnerabilities actively exploited by threat actors. That way, they can focus on vulnerabilities that pose immediate risk, ensuring appropriate allocation of resources. For example, if a critical vulnerability in a widely used open-source module is actively being exploited, the team would prioritize patching it over other vulnerabilities to prevent a potential breach.
Due to its multi-step process, vulnerability remediation can be incredibly time and energy-consuming. This is especially true for small cybersecurity teams with limited resources. To accelerate and automate remediation, modern cybersecurity teams use a wide range of tools that assist them with tasks like:
These include automated vulnerability scanning tools like Static Application Security Testing (SAST) programs, which automatically scan code, applications, and infrastructure for security flaws and vulnerabilities. Other tools that fall under this category include security information and event management (SIEM) systems and cloud security platforms, which can monitor for policy misconfigurations and violations. Such tools can also trigger automated remediation actions.
These include automated patching and update tools, which can automatically find outdated components and suggest stable and secure versions. Other remediation automation tools include infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools and configuration management platforms that can automate the process of making required configuration changes to fix issues.
These include security tools with development and security processes, such as CI/CD pipelines. When automation tools are integrated into these pipelines, they can automatically scan code for vulnerabilities and deploy fixes as part of the software development process.
By picking the right tools and solutions, teams will be able to perform vulnerability remediation effectively and efficiently, even with limited personnel. Here’s what teams should look for when picking tools for vulnerability remediation:
By implementing the right software and following best practices, your cybersecurity team can protect assets and data from threat actors and significantly improve your company’s security posture.
Starting or improving your vulnerability remediation process can be daunting, especially when it’s your first time. Here are some steps for putting it into practice:
Begin with a scan of your asset inventories in order to identify all applications, systems, and devices vulnerable to third-party exploitation. Besides using automated tools to scan for known vulnerabilities in your assets, simulate real-world attacks via penetration testing tools. These programs can spot vulnerabilities that may be missed by automated scans.
Now that you’ve identified vulnerabilities in your IT system, you can focus on prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their severity through the common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) and business impact.
Next, decide which team or individual is responsible for identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and addressing vulnerabilities. Once assigned, teams and individuals are responsible for determining the best course of action for remediation (i.e., mitigation, patching, or risk acceptance) and ensuring the remediation is done effectively.
The security team then integrates remediation into CI/CD, an automated workflow for rapid and frequent integration, testing, and deployment of code changes. Integrating remediation into CI/CD allows teams to automate remediation, detect vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC)—a practice known as “shifting left” in DevSecOps or Agile. That way, security is an ongoing process, not just a one-time task at the end of the SDLC. Ultimately, integrating remediation into CI/CD makes it easier to spot and fix vulnerabilities faster.
Also known as mean time to remediate (MTTR), TTR is the average time it takes to resolve a security vulnerability, from identification to resolution. Teams can calculate it by averaging the time required to remediate all identified vulnerabilities. The lower the TTR, the better your system reliability and overall cybersecurity posture are. Generally, a TTR of under 30 days is considered good for high-risk (CVSS 7-8.9) vulnerabilities. Under 14 days is preferred for critical (CVSS 9-10) vulnerabilities.
This means creating, documenting, and implementing consistent, repeatable solutions for addressing recurring security incidents and vulnerabilities. By standardizing fix patterns, you can boost efficiency, reduce errors, and ensure a more predictable and reliable security posture.
Holding regular security retrospectives—meetings to reflect on past security practices, incidents, and processes—can help identify areas for improvement. This will make it easier for your cybersecurity team to improve and implement changes to improve security posture.
Finally, you should use tools to proactively identify and fix vulnerabilities before threat actors exploit them. Consider adopting vulnerability scanners like Kiuwan SAST and SCA, patch management systems, and penetration testing platforms.
Vulnerability remediation can be a complicated process, especially when you’re implementing it for the first time. If you’re looking for reliable and user-friendly vulnerability remediation tools with all of these features, consider Kiuwan Code Security (SAST) and Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Insights.
Kiuwan Code Security is a leading Static Application Security Testing (SAST) program that analyzes application source code to spot and fix security vulnerabilities, software governance concerns, and code quality issues. It supports over 30 programming languages and integrates seamlessly into development workflows.
Kiuuwan SCA Insights complements Kiuwan SAST by helping you manage open-source risk. It automatically scans and analyzes open-source and third-party code for vulnerabilities, license compatibility issues, and other cybersecurity risks.Together, both tools ensure teams can find and fix vulnerabilities in time, resulting in a safe and secure IT environment for staff, stakeholders, and users alike. Request a free demo today, and see for yourself how our end-to-end application security can help your organization.
