The Best Way To Prioritize Vulnerabilities

The key to effective vulnerability prioritization

Prioritizing vulnerability remediation is a critical task for your IT security teams. There are simply too many vulnerabilities in your IT ecosystem to patch them all, and effective vulnerability prioritization enables teams to address the greatest risks first.

Determining risk for vulnerabilities, however, is not an easy task. The traditional vulnerability prioritization process is inherently flawed, as it measures only the approximate severity of exploitation, rather than the likelihood – or risk – that attackers will actually exploit a particular vulnerability. In fact, some of the most devastating cyberattacks in recent years have exploited vulnerabilities that were rated medium or low by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System or CVSS.

To protect your organization, your IT security teams need a better way to determine which vulnerabilities represent the greatest risk, so you can prioritize remediation accordingly. That’s why Cybersixgill offers Dynamic Vulnerability ExploitIntelligence, (DVE Intelligence), a solution that allows you to accurately predict the likelihood of vulnerability exploitation over the next 90 days.

Why vulnerability prioritization is so hard

In 2021, there were more than 18,000 common vulnerabilities and exposures, or CVEs, reported and classified in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Within the database, each CVE is given a CVSS score based on its severity – or the amount of damage it can do to an organization if exploited by a malicious actor.

For security teams, evaluating and patching all these vulnerabilities is impossible – they simply don’t have enough time or resources. Vulnerability prioritization is essential, yet the standard methods for evaluating and prioritizing vulnerabilities are flawed. The CVSS framework evaluates the possible damage that could result from exploiting a particular vulnerability. But a CVE rating may be assigned weeks after a vulnerability is discovered, leaving your security teams in the dark about its potential severity. Scores rarely change, even when a little-known vulnerability becomes quite popular with attackers later on. And while the CVSS vulnerability assessment suggests the potential severity of damage associated with a vulnerability, it doesn’t indicate how likely attackers are to exploit it, making effective prioritization virtually impossible.

Vulnerability prioritization with Cybersixgill

To help your security teams improve vulnerability management , Cybersixgill has introduced DVE Intelligence. This AI-based solution is designed to answer the most critical question in vulnerability prioritization: what is the likelihood that a given vulnerability will be exploited in the next 90 days?

DVE Intelligence analyzes conversations and insights from the cybercriminal underground to develop an accurate and real-time risk assessment of each vulnerability based on threat actor intent. Our technology automatically monitors and scrapes intelligence from discussions on the clear, deep and dark web, combining this data with insights from sources like code repositories, surface websites and instant messaging platforms to quickly produce a score that predicts the probability of vulnerability exploitation in the near future. Natural Language Processing capacities and advanced algorithms allow us to translate discussions in any and all languages and in OCR image-to-text capture as well.

With DVE Intelligence, you can:

Dramatically improve vulnerability prioritization and patching cadence with real-time contextual data on CVEs and indicators of compromise (IOCs).
Protect your organization with automated early warnings of new malware threats and new CVEs, even before they’ve been scored by the NVD.
Improve understanding of the lifecycle of vulnerabilities as well as malware trends and TTPs (tactics, techniques and protocols).
Integrate analysis of threats and vulnerabilities directly and easily with existing security technology.
Understand the rationale for each DVE score with an audit trail that gives your security teams the data they need to justify actions for peers and superiors.

How Cybersixgill gathers intelligence from the dark web

Cybercrime is big business and it thrives in web forums, instant messaging apps, and other closed sources on the dark web. This is where the tools for cyberattacks are sold and traded. From leaked information and compromised credentials to phishing kits and ransomware tools, the deep and dark web is the place where cyber criminals plan their malicious campaigns. For companies fighting cybercrime, it’s the best place to gain intelligence that can help to protect against external threats.

To determine the likelihood that a vulnerability will be exploited in the near future, our technology performs continuous, AI-driven, real-time analysis of multiple streams of threat intelligence. We gather intelligence from sources that include limited-access deep and dark web forms and markets, invite-only messaging groups, code repositories, paste sites, clear web platforms, social media platforms and illicit underground markets. Our fully automated collection and source infiltration capabilities allow us to scrape data that’s inaccessible to other vendors. Advanced AI and ML algorithms index, correlate, analyze, tag and filter raw data, combining it with comprehensive threat actor profiles to produce real-time intelligence about the likelihood that a vulnerability is about to be exploited.

This analysis allows us to catch events as they happen, before attacks are deployed or leaked credentials are sold. With unmatched extraction speed, Cybersixgill dark web monitoring and DVE Intelligence is the best source for real-time insight that can transform vulnerability prioritization.

Why choose Cybersixgill?

Cybersixgill provides organizations with exclusive, real-time access to the largest database of deep, dark and clear web threat activity available today. Our technologies enable security teams to discover what attackers are planning before they strike. Our methods of collecting threat data are light years ahead of the curve, allowing security analysts to understand how critical each threat or breach is and how best to manage vulnerability prioritization. Security teams can gain instant insight about threat status, asset criticality and actions required for remediation.

Our solutions are 100% automated. This enables an average detection time of just seconds, where other solutions may take days or weeks to detect a threat. We collect data from 10x more dark web forums, markets, and paste sites than our competitors, and our technology performs extraction 24x faster. With Cybersixgill, your security teams have the agile, automated and contextual cyber threat intelligence they need to preempt attacks.

FAQs

What is vulnerability prioritization?

Vulnerability prioritization is the practice of determining which vulnerabilities in software and IT systems should be remediated first, based on the severity of damage they could cause and the likelihood that they may be exploited by malicious actors.

What is the best way to prioritize vulnerabilities?

Ideally, vulnerability prioritization should be based on the likelihood that a vulnerability will be exploited by malicious actors. However, most methods for assessing risk focus on severity, rather than probability. That’s why many organizations are seeking solutions like those offered by Cybersixgill which predict likelihood of attack based on chatter and information gathered from the dark web.

What is a CVE?