Vulnerability Management & Patch Management
The attack surface of companies has increased considerably in recent years. In the past, companies secured their assets on on-site servers, but today the business environment consists of various technologies that even extend beyond the company's boundaries. Securing corporate resources such as operating systems and applications is a multi-stage process that must be carried out continuously.
Against the backdrop of zero-day security risks, i.e. bugs in the software for which no official patch or security update has been released, IT teams must monitor and deploy security patches to protect various points of attack for hackers. The process of identifying security vulnerabilities and applying the appropriate patches and updates to address these vulnerabilities is known as vulnerability and patch management. This process is critical to the security of any business/organization.
We support you in implementing effective vulnerability and patch management by performing the following steps:
- Identification: In this step, the existing vulnerabilities, patch backlogs and misconfigurations in the systems and applications are identified. This is done using special tools and scanners.
- Assessment: In this step, the identified vulnerabilities and patches are assessed according to their impact and risk. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) standard is used, which provides an objective and consistent method for measuring the severity of vulnerabilities. The scoring also helps to define exceptions that do not need to or cannot be patched, e.g. for compatibility or business value reasons.
- Deployment: In this step, the required patches and updates are tested, validated and installed. This requires careful test management to ensure that the patches do not have a negative impact on the functionality or performance of the systems and applications. The results of the tests are documented and evaluated before the patches are applied to the production environment.
- Assets: In this step, the assets that are subject to vulnerability and patch management are defined and managed. This includes the creation and updating of a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which contains all relevant information about the assets, such as location, owner, dependencies, configurations, patches, etc. A discovery process is also carried out to identify new or changed assets and add them to the CMDB.
