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Understanding Security Vulnerability Assessments
Learn the importance of a security vulnerability assessment and the right approach organizations should take to keep up with new systems and challenges.
Article Contents
- What is a Security Vulnerability Assessment and How Does it Work?
- Why Is a Security Vulnerability Assessment Important?
- Why Should Organizations Conduct an SVA?
- How do Organizations Approach SVA Today?
- How Does Security Vulnerability Assessment Work in Modern Architectures?
- Keeping Up with New Systems and Challenges
Defining Security Vulnerability Assessment
What is a Security Vulnerability Assessment and How Does it Work?
Security vulnerability assessment in the software supply chain involves continuously monitoring vulnerabilities for deployed artifacts, understanding who consumes the impacted artifacts, and score the vulnerabilities’ rank by severity. This information is needed to improve the company’s threat prevention and mitigation processes.
Why Is a Security Vulnerability Assessment Important?
A vulnerability is any weakness within the IT environment that can be exploited by a threat actor during a cyber attack, allowing them access to systems, applications, data and other assets. As such, it is crucial for organizations to identify these weaknesses before cybercriminals discover them and utilize them as part of an attack.
It is certainly possible for organizations to discover hundreds of vulnerabilities within their environment each year – any one of which could lead to a breach or attack.
The reality is that these scans would be incredibly time consuming if done manually, to the point where it would be nearly impossible for teams to identify and patch all vulnerabilities as they are introduced. Automating continuous vulnerability assessments through the use of tools or software to identify weaknesses and external threats.
Why Should Organizations Conduct an SVA?
Security vulnerability assessments help organizations identify and reduce potential points of unauthorized access in their networks – both internal and external. SVA can help to reduce the likelihood of an attacker being able breach security.
With continuous security vulnerability assessments, you get a better understanding of your most valuable assets and their vulnerabilities, and the risk of your organization as a whole. It also plays an important role in ensuring organizations are compliant with cybersecurity regulations.
What is the Risk of Not Performing a Security Vulnerability Assessment?
If an organization fails to perform security vulnerability assessment on a regular basis, it can lead to very serious, and even dire consequences, including potential data loss, revenue loss, and theft of confidential information.
How do Organizations Approach SVA Today?
In the digital age, nearly all organizations are moving online. As a result, more companies are adopting advanced security measures like continuous SVA to identify and remediate threats and vulnerabilities.
Businesses of all sizes need to identify and fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, however, large enterprises typically face more security challenges. Large organizations are most exposed to external attacks, and benefit most from utilizing continuous security vulnerability assessment.
Organizations typically run scans at set times and scheduled intervals for patching and upgrades.
A common security challenge that organizations face is a lack of visibility into their digital infrastructure. SVA helps organizations know the vulnerabilities that exist before attackers can expose them.
How Does Security Vulnerability Assessment Work in Modern Architectures?
Security vulnerability assessment can be challenging in modern, decoupled architectures due to the high number of reusable components and dependency relationships. As software systems grow in complexity, the ability to accurately predict the impact of a single vulnerability becomes more challenging.
The intricate relationships between components and consuming applications may not always be easily seen, and missing or outdated documentation can hinder developers’ understanding of system intricacies. Without automated and comprehensive relationship mapping, developers risk being unaware of the impact of a single component across the entire ecosystem.
In a modern architecture, security testing needs to start early in the application lifecycle process. Decoupled architectures add a level of complexity that requires more knowledge about all the pieces of the software supply chain for improving security vulnerability assessment.
In a decoupled architecture, components are independently built and deployed, as they have their own vulnerabilities and SBOMs. As new vulnerabilities are identified, IT Teams need the component’s blast radius to quickly contain the vulnerability found.
Security Vulnerability Assessment and the Blast Radius
There is a need for end-to-end security vulnerability assessments.
Organizations are looking for delivery velocity. With continuous SVA, developers can develop and deliver at speed, to ensure you have vigilance and security.
With modern architecture, a security vulnerability assessment should start early in the software lifecycle development process.
On the other end of this is “blast radius”, which measures the total impact of a potential security event. This is why continuous security vulnerability assessments are so important for organizations, so teams can understand the impact of a single vulnerability.
Understanding Blast Radius
The blast radius concept originates from the idea that a change or failure in one part of a system can have a cascading effect on other interconnected components. Essentially, the blast radius measures the potential scope of impact, in terms of the breadth of affected components as well as the severity of the consequences. A strategic security vulnerability assessment requires a full understanding of the scope of the attack. The blast radius exposes the scope.
There are many key factors that can contribute to accurate security vulnerability assessment. First understanding the impact of a vulnerability requires knowledge of the affected component’s blast radius. Understanding the component’s consumers exposes the potential impact across the entire organization.
Component Blast Radius Risk
The component’s blast radius risk includes:
- Interdependencies – Software systems are often composed of interdependent components that rely on one another’s functionality. Vulnerabilities found in a critical component could create a ripple effect, impacting downstream dependencies and causing unforeseen issues. Security vulnerability assessment should expose these interdependencies.
- Integration Points – Integration points (like APIs, databases, and external services) represent potential areas of vulnerability. Alterations to these integration points can disrupt the flow of data and communication between components.
- Data Flow and State – Changes in the way data is processed or the state is managed within a component can lead to inconsistencies and errors throughout the system. Understanding the data flow is important for assessing the potential blast radius.
Continuous Security Vulnerability Is Needed to Keep Up with New Systems and Challenges
To keep up with new systems and the updates and changes that are made, we need continuous security vulnerability assessments, to detect and remediate security risks before they are exploited by attackers.
DeployHub Security Vulnerability Assessment for the Software Supply Chain
DeployHub’s vigilantly watches all of your CI/CD pipelines for threats and immediately reports them to secure high-frequency releases across your organization’s constantly evolving landscape.
Make Your Security Intelligence Actionable
Put Your SBOM Data to Work. Signup for DeployHub Team, the free SaaS software supply chain security platform. DeployHub Team is based on the Ortelius Open-Source project incubating at the Continuous Delivery Foundation.
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