Threat-Informed Vulnerability Management

Threat-Informed Vulnerability Management (TIVM) is a strategic approach to vulnerability management that prioritizes remediation efforts based on the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited by attackers. It moves beyond simply patching vulnerabilities based on their CVSS score to consider the threat landscape, attacker activity, and the organization's specific context.

Here's a breakdown of critical aspects of TIVM:

1. Threat Intelligence Integration:

• Gathering Threat Intelligence: Collecting and analyzing threat intelligence from various sources, including open-source feeds, commercial providers, and internal security research. It includes information on attacker activity, emerging threats, exploit trends, and vulnerabilities actively exploited in the wild.

• Mapping Threats to Vulnerabilities: Correlating threat intelligence with known vulnerabilities in the organization's systems and applications. It helps identify which vulnerabilities are most likely to be targeted by attackers.

2. Contextual Risk Assessment:

• Asset Criticality: Considering the criticality of assets affected by vulnerabilities and prioritizing vulnerabilities that impact critical systems or sensitive data.

• Exploit Availability: Assessing the availability of exploits for specific vulnerabilities and prioritizing vulnerabilities with publicly available or easily accessible exploits.

• Attacker Activity: Analyzing attacker activity and TTPs to understand which vulnerabilities are actively exploited by relevant threat actors.

3. Prioritized Remediation:

• Risk-Based Prioritization: Prioritizing vulnerability remediation efforts based on the likelihood and potential impact of exploitation, not just CVSS scores.

• Focus on Critical Threats: Focusing resources on addressing vulnerabilities that pose the most significant risk to the organization based on threat intelligence and contextual factors.

• Proactive Mitigation: Implementing proactive security controls and mitigation strategies to address vulnerabilities likely to be exploited, even if they haven't been observed in active attacks yet.

Benefits of TIVM:

• Reduced Attack Surface: By prioritizing the most critical vulnerabilities, TIVM helps reduce the overall attack surface and minimize the risk of successful attacks.

• Improved Resource Allocation: TIVM helps optimize resource allocation by focusing efforts on the most likely threats, maximizing the impact of security investments.

• Enhanced Agility: TIVM enables organizations to adapt quickly to the evolving threat landscape by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on real-world threats.

• Increased Confidence: TIVM provides a stronger sense of security and confidence in the organization's ability to defend against cyberattacks.

By integrating threat intelligence and contextual awareness into vulnerability management, TIVM empowers organizations to adopt a more proactive and practical approach to cybersecurity, ensuring that their efforts are focused on the most critical threats.

ThreatNG can be a powerful enabler of Threat-Informed Vulnerability Management (TIVM) by providing the necessary data, context, and prioritization capabilities. Here's how:

1. Threat Intelligence Integration:

• Extensive Threat Intelligence Repositories: ThreatNG provides access to a wealth of threat intelligence, including dark web data, compromised credentials, ransomware events, and known vulnerabilities. It allows for comprehensive analysis of the threat landscape and identification of emerging threats.

• Vulnerability Correlation: ThreatNG correlates identified vulnerabilities with threat intelligence feeds to determine which vulnerabilities are actively exploited in the wild and by which threat actors.

• Technology Stack Identification: By identifying the technologies used by the organization, ThreatNG can provide specific threat intelligence related to those technologies, allowing for more targeted vulnerability prioritization.

2. Contextual Risk Assessment:

• Asset Discovery and Criticality: ThreatNG's comprehensive asset discovery capabilities provide a complete inventory of all external assets, including their associated technologies and potential vulnerabilities. It allows for assessing asset criticality and prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their likely impact.

• Exploit Availability: ThreatNG's vulnerability assessment includes information on exploit availability, helping to prioritize vulnerabilities that are more likely to be exploited due to readily available exploit code.

• Attacker Activity: ThreatNG's threat intelligence provides insights into attacker activity and TTPs, allowing for the prioritization of vulnerabilities based on their relevance to current attack trends and the organization's specific industry or sector.

3. Prioritized Remediation:

• Risk-Based Prioritization: ThreatNG combines vulnerability data, threat intelligence, and asset criticality to generate risk scores that prioritize vulnerabilities based on the likelihood and potential impact of exploitation.

• Actionable Reporting: ThreatNG provides detailed reports with actionable recommendations for remediation, allowing security teams to focus on the most critical vulnerabilities first.

• Integration with Vulnerability Scanners: ThreatNG can integrate with existing vulnerability scanners to enrich vulnerability data with threat intelligence and prioritize remediation efforts.

Working with Complementary Solutions:

• Vulnerability Management Tools: ThreatNG complements vulnerability management tools by providing context and prioritization capabilities for threat intelligence.

• SIEM/SOAR: ThreatNG can integrate with SIEM/SOAR platforms to enrich security alerts with threat intelligence and automate incident response for prioritized vulnerabilities.

• Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs): ThreatNG can feed data into TIPs to enhance their understanding of the organization's threat landscape and improve vulnerability prioritization.

Examples:

• Prioritizing Patching: ThreatNG identifies a web server vulnerability being actively exploited by a known APT group targeting the organization's industry. This information allows the security team to prioritize patching this vulnerability over others with lower risk scores.

• Mitigating Zero-Day Exploits: ThreatNG identifies a zero-day vulnerability with no available patch. ThreatNG determines that this vulnerability is being used in targeted attacks against similar organizations by analyzing threat intelligence. It allows the security team to implement proactive mitigation measures, such as network segmentation or intrusion detection rules, to reduce the risk of exploitation.

• Focusing on Critical Assets: ThreatNG identifies a vulnerability in a critical system responsible for processing sensitive customer data. Even though the vulnerability has a low CVSS score, ThreatNG assigns it a high-risk score due to the asset's criticality. It ensures that the vulnerability is addressed promptly.

By combining comprehensive asset discovery, vulnerability assessment, threat intelligence integration, and risk-based prioritization, ThreatNG empowers organizations to implement TIVM and effectively manage their vulnerabilities in the evolving threat landscape.