Vulnerability Management

What is a vulnerability?

A vulnerability is weakness in an information system, system security procedures, internal controls, or implementation that could be exploited or triggered by a threat source.

Cybercriminals conduct external scans on your computer systems to identify weaknesses in your firewall, if you have one. Once they find a vulnerability, hackers employ automated methods to systematically probe each device connected to your network, searching for an opportunity to gain administrative control and potentially take over a single computer or the entire network. The size of a business is not a determining factor for cybercriminals; what matters to them is the ease of access.

Despite the belief held by many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that they are too insignificant to be targeted by hackers, breach reports indicate otherwise. In fact, 66% of SMBs have experienced a cyberattack in the past year. The majority of these attacks (70%) were carried out through web applications and various internal vulnerabilities.

Many vulnerabilities impact popular software, placing the many customers using the software at a heightened risk of a data breach, or supply chain attack. Such zero-day exploits are registered by MITRE as a Common Vulnerability Exposure (CVE).

Patch management involves discovering and updating software within your IT infrastructure. This process can include automated and manual procedures for identifying, reporting and applying patches. A similar but different method known as vulnerability management is the process of discovering and remediating vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure. Like patch management, vulnerability management can use similar manual and automated techniques; however, not all vulnerabilities involve patching a system or application.

What are the business risks?

The ultimate peril in the digital landscape is a system breach leading to ransom, a threat so significant that it has earned its place as a paramount concern. The Australian Cyber Security Centre's inclusion of this risk in the essential "Essential Eight" cybersecurity strategies underscores its gravity. A system breach not only jeopardizes sensitive data but also poses the potential for extortion through ransom demands, emphasizing the critical importance of prioritizing measures to safeguard against such catastrophic events.

How does Enable manage vulnerabilities?

Enable have systems to scan and identify vulnerabilities on your computers, servers and network devices. These vulnerabilities could be a manual configuration change to a device or an update to an application such as Adobe. As part of this vulnerability scanning and detection, the remediation methods are carried out on a regular basis. We have the ability to patch/update over 100,000 commonly used applications.