vPrioritizer: understand vPRisk on asset-vulnerability relationship level

by do son · March 5, 2021

vPrioritizer

As indicated by sources like vulndb & cve, on a daily basis, approximately 50 new vulnerabilities become known to the industry and it’s safe to assume that count is going to increase furthermore. It’s a huge number of vulnerabilities to assess and remediate effectively and quickly. So today organizations are focusing (or should focus) on reducing the risk rather than eliminating it and vulnerability management is (almost) equal to risk prioritization and risk is a variable and dynamic concept determined by multiple factors.

Theoretically, the approach of considering factors like base CVSS, asset accessibility, criticality, exploit availability, business sensitivity, etc. looks appropriate to adopt but it’s not practically possible to do it manually for every vulnerability affecting every asset by every organization.

Goals and Philosophy

To overcome the above challenges, vPrioritizer is designed with primary objectives as below:

Centralized – must serve as single-pane-of-glass for vulnerability management
Automated – any and every task which can be automated, must be automated
Community Analytics – utilization of community analytics to mature the prioritization algorithm over the period of time

How it Works

vPrioritizer gives us the ability to assess the risk on different layers such as (and hence comprehensive control on the granularity of each of risk as described above in the risk calculation section):

We can assign significance on a per asset basis
We can assess severity on a per vulnerability basis
At the same time, we can adjust both factors at the asset & vulnerability relationship level
On top of that, community analytics provides insights as suggested risk

vPrioritizer enables us to understand the contextualized risk pertaining to each asset by each vulnerability across the organization. Its community-based analytics provides a suggested risk for each vulnerability identified by vulnerability scanners and further strengthens the risk prioritization process. So at any point in time teams can make an effective and more informed decision, based on unified and standardized data, about what (vulnerability/ties) they should remediate (or can afford not to) and on which (asset/s).