Exploitability Filtering: The Not-So-Secret Tool for Better Prioritization

By Fortra's Digital Defense

Proper prioritization is paramount for today’s resource-strapped IT departments. This is especially true when deciding which security vulnerabilities should be addressed first.

Studies suggest that up to 25% of all discovered vulnerabilities rank as “high” or “critical” severity. Your IT team could have several “critical” vulnerabilities competing for attention at any given time. This can result in an unproductive quagmire in which teams spend more time debating task priorities than actually working tasks.

So, if your team has a whole list of “critical” vulnerabilities to address, how can they decide which urgent issue to tackle first?

At Digital Defense we created our Frontline Vulnerability Manager™ (Frontline VM™) solution to provide several layers of insight to help with proper vulnerability and threat prioritization. Our initial reporting provides clear, comprehensive results that include:

  • Severity labels (Critical – Trivial)
  • Internal Frontline Security GPA® rankings
  • External Frontline Security GPA® rankings
  • Vulnerability age

 

The Threat Perspective

Exploitability is an important parameter to examine when evaluating the urgency of your vulnerabilities. It indicates that a specific path exists for exploiting a vulnerability, taking the method of attack from theoretical to factual.

Introducing the exploitability factor into your reporting allows you to look at vulnerabilities from a threat perspective. It provides you with a different angle from which to examine threats against your system. This insight provides added granularity, potentially reducing the number of critical vulnerabilities that need your team’s immediate attention.

Frontline VM Users: We’ll show you how to add the exploitability filter in Frontline VM at the end of this blog.

 

Determining Exploitability

The Vulnerability Research Team (VRT™) at Digital Defense is comprised of experienced, credentialed security researchers that proactively investigate vulnerabilities and threats. Their hard work translates directly into timely disclosures for our clients, as well as key discoveries that are shared with the larger security community.

Information gathered from the VRT fuels the exploitability filter. This provides additional, expert intelligence to Frontline VM scanning results.

 

Adding the Exploitability Filter in Frontline VM

If you are a Frontline VM user, it’s easy to add the exploitability filter to your reporting display.  Beginning from your Frontline VM at a Glance dashboard, click “Show All” on the top right of your “At Risk Assets” list or navigate to the Active View.

Be sure you are on the vulnerabilities tab in your Active View. Exploitability is defined as “Vuln: Exploitable” and is easily found in the filters dropdown list. Click the filters icon and locate “Vuln: Exploitable” in the dropdown.

To apply this filter, select “Vuln: Exploitable” with “is” and “true” qualifiers.

Vulnerability Management Made Easy

At Digital Defense, we are here to simplify and streamline your vulnerability management. Our team is dedicated to ensuring our Frontline VM customers get actionable results and empowering insight in a user-friendly solution. Frontline VM is delivered via our SaaS Frontline.Cloud™ platform that is lightweight and simple to deploy. It also supports our threat scanning (Frontline ATS™) and web application scanning (Frontline WAS™) systems. If you haven’t experienced the Frontline difference, why not try Frontline.Cloud free for 30 days.

We are also happy to answer any questions. Contact Us.

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