IT Asset, Vulnerability, and Patch Management Best Practices

The vulnerability management lifecycle is a continuous process for discovering, addressing, and prioritizing vulnerabilities in an organization's IT assets

A normal round of the lifecycle has five phases:

1. Asset inventory and vulnerability assessment
2. Vulnerability prioritization
3. Vulnerability resolution
4. Verification and monitoring
5. Reporting and improvement

 The vulnerability management lifecycle enables companies to improve their security posture by adopting a more strategic approach. Instead of reacting to new vulnerabilities as they appear, security teams actively hunt for flaws in their systems. Organizations can identify the most critical vulnerabilities and put protections in place before a threat strikes.

Every vulnerability is a risk for an organization. Hackers have a growing pile of vulnerabilities at their disposal. In response, enterprises have made vulnerability management a key component of their Risk Management strategies. The vulnerability management lifecycle offers a proven model for effective vulnerability management programs in an ever-changing cyberthreat landscape. By adopting the lifecycle, organizations can see some of the following benefits:

• Proactive vulnerability discovery and resolution: Businesses often don’t know about their vulnerabilities until hackers have exploited them. The vulnerability management lifecycle is built around continuous monitoring, enabling security teams to find vulnerabilities before adversaries do.
• Strategic resource allocation: Tens of thousands of new vulnerabilities are discovered yearly, but only a few are relevant to a given organization. The vulnerability management lifecycle helps enterprises pinpoint their networks' most critical vulnerabilities, then prioritize the most significant risks for remediation.
• Consistent, plannable vulnerability management process: The vulnerability management lifecycle provides security teams with a repeatable process from vulnerability discovery through remediation and beyond. This produces more consistent results, and it enables companies to automate key workflows like asset inventory, vulnerability assessment, and patch management.

Planning and Prep Work 

Formally, planning and prework happen before the vulnerability management lifecycle is pressed into service. During this stage, the organization irons out critical details of the vulnerability management process by identifying the following:

• Stakeholders involved, and their roles
• Resources, tools, and funding available for vulnerability management
• Guidelines for vulnerability prioritization and response 
• Metrics for measuring the project's success

This prework can eliminate the need for an organization to go through this stage before every lifecycle round and lead to a speedier overall response. Generally, a company conducts an extensive planning and prework phase before it launches a formal vulnerability management program. Once a program is in place, stakeholders periodically revisit planning and prework to update their overall guidelines and strategies as needed.

Asset Discovery and Vulnerability Assessment

The formal vulnerability management lifecycle begins with an asset inventory — a catalog of all the hardware and software on the organization’s network, including officially sanctioned apps, endpoints, and any IT assets employees use without approval.

Because new assets are regularly added to company networks, the asset inventory must be updated before each lifecycle round. Companies often use software tools and platforms to automate their inventories.

After identifying assets, the security team assesses them for vulnerabilities. The team can use a combination of tools and methods, including automated vulnerability scanners, manual penetration testing, and external model threat testing from the cybersecurity community.

Assessing every asset during every round of the lifecycle would be onerous, so security teams usually work in batches. Each round of the lifecycle focuses on a specific group of assets, with more critical asset groups receiving scans more often. Some advanced vulnerability scanning tools continuously assess all network assets in real time, enabling the security team to take a more dynamic approach to vulnerability discovery.

Vulnerability Prioritization

The security team prioritizes the vulnerabilities identified during the assessment stage. Prioritization ensures that the team addresses the most critical vulnerabilities first. This stage also helps the team avoid pouring time and resources into low-risk vulnerabilities. 

To prioritize vulnerabilities, the team considers these criteria:

• Criticality ratings from external threat intelligence: This can include MITRE’s Common Vulnerabilities list or the Community Vulnerabilities Scoring System.
• Asset criticality: A noncritical vulnerability in a critical asset often receives higher priority than a critical vulnerability in a less important asset.
• Potential impact: The security team assesses what might happen if hackers exploit a given vulnerability, including effects on business operations, financial losses, and any potential legal action.
• Likelihood of exploitation: The security team pays more attention to vulnerabilities with known exploits that hackers actively use in the wild.
• False positives: The security team ensures that vulnerabilities actually exist before dedicating any resources to them. 

Vulnerability Resolution

The security team works through the list of prioritized vulnerabilities, from most critical to least critical. Organizations have three options to address vulnerabilities:

1. Remediation: Fully address a vulnerability so it can no longer be exploited, such as by patching an operating system bug, fixing a misconfiguration, or removing the vulnerable asset from the network. However, remediation isn’t always feasible. For some vulnerabilities, complete fixes aren’t available at the time of discovery. For other vulnerabilities, remediation would be too resource-intensive. 
2. Mitigation: Make the vulnerability more difficult to exploit or reduce its impact without removing it entirely. For example, adding stricter authentication and authorization measures to a web application would make it harder for hackers to hijack accounts. Crafting incident response plans for identified vulnerabilities can help mitigate the impact of cyberattacks. Security teams usually choose to mitigate when remediation is impossible or prohibitively expensive.
3. Acceptance: Some vulnerabilities are so low-impact or unlikely to be exploited that fixing them isn’t cost-effective. In these cases, the organization can choose to accept the vulnerability.

Verification and Monitoring

To verify that mitigation and remediation efforts worked as intended, the security team rescans and retests the assets they just worked on. These audits have two primary purposes: to determine if the security team successfully addressed all known vulnerabilities and ensure that mitigation and remediation didn’t introduce any new problems.

As part of this reassessment stage, the security team also monitors the network more broadly. The team looks for any new vulnerabilities that have emerged since the last scan, old mitigations that have grown obsolete, or other changes that may require action. All of these findings help inform the next round of the lifecycle.

Reporting and Improvement

 The security team documents activity from the most recent round of the lifecycle, including vulnerabilities found, resolution steps taken, and outcomes. These reports are shared with relevant stakeholders, including executives, asset owners, compliance departments, and others. 

The security team also reflects on how the most recent lifecycle round went. The team may look at key metrics like mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), total number of critical vulnerabilities, and vulnerability recurrence rates. By tracking these metrics over time, the security team can establish a baseline for the vulnerability management program’s performance and identify opportunities to improve it. Lessons learned from one round of the lifecycle can make the next round more effective.

What Are Security Vulnerabilities?

A security vulnerability is any weakness in the structure, function, or implementation of an IT asset or network. Hackers or other threat actors can exploit these weaknesses to gain unauthorized access and cause harm to the network, users, or the business. Common vulnerabilities include:

• Coding flaws, such as web apps that are susceptible to cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and other injection attacks, due to how they handle user input.
• Unprotected open ports in servers, laptops, and other endpoints, which hackers could use to spread malware, spyware, etc.
• Misconfigurations, such as a cloud storage bucket with inappropriate access permissions, exposing sensitive data to the public internet.
• Missing patches, weak passwords, or other deficiencies in cybersecurity hygiene.

Sometimes considered a part of vulnerability management, patch management is the process of applying vendor-issued updates to close security vulnerabilities and optimize the performance of software and devices.

In practice, patch management is about balancing cybersecurity with the business's operational needs. Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in a company's IT environment to launch cyberattacks and spread malware. Vendors release patches to fix these vulnerabilities. However, the patching process can interrupt workflows and create downtime for the business. Patch management aims to minimize that downtime by streamlining patch deployment. 

Why the Patch Management Process Matters

Patch management establishes a centralized, consistent, and repeatable process for applying patches to IT assets. These patches can improve security, enhance performance, and boost productivity.

Security Updates

Security patches address specific security risks, often by remediating a particular vulnerability.

Hackers often target unpatched assets, so the failure to apply security updates can expose a company to security breaches. Cybercriminals attacked networks where admins had neglected to apply the patch, infecting more than 200,000 computers/devices in 100-plus countries.

Feature Updates

Some patches bring new features to apps and devices. These updates can improve asset performance and user productivity.

Bug Fixes

Bug fixes address minor issues in hardware or software. Typically, these issues don't cause security problems but do affect asset performance.

Minimizing dDowntime

Most companies find it impractical to download and apply every patch for every asset as soon as it's available. That's because patching requires downtime. Users must stop work, log out, and reboot key systems to apply patches.

A formal patch management process allows organizations to prioritize critical updates. The company can gain the benefits of these patches with minimal disruption to employee workflows.

Regulatory Compliance

Under regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), companies must follow certain cybersecurity practices. Patch management can help organizations keep critical systems compliant with these mandates.

The Patch Management Lifecycle

Most companies treat patch management as a continuous lifecycle. This is because vendors release new patches regularly. Furthermore, a company's patching needs may change as its IT environment changes.

To outline patch management best practices for admins and end users throughout the lifecycle, companies draft formal patch management policies.

The stages of the patch management lifecycle include:

1 - Asset Management

To keep tabs on IT resources, IT and security teams create inventories of network assets, such as third-party applications, operating systems, mobile devices, and on-premises and remote endpoints.

IT teams may also specify which hardware and software versions employees can use. This asset standardization can help simplify patching by reducing the number of distinct asset types on the network. Standardization can also prevent employees from using unsafe, outdated, or incompatible apps and devices.

2 - Patch Monitoring

Once IT and security teams have a complete asset inventory, they can monitor available patches, track patch status across assets, and identify assets missing patches.

3 - Patch Prioritization

Some patches are more important than others, especially when it comes to security patches. IT and security teams use resources like threat intelligence feeds to pinpoint the most critical vulnerabilities in their systems. Patches for these vulnerabilities are prioritized over less essential updates.

Prioritization is one of the key ways patch management policies aim to reduce downtime. By rolling out critical patches first, IT and security teams can protect the network while shortening the time resources spend offline for patching.

4 - Patch Testing

New patches can occasionally cause problems, break integrations, or fail to address the vulnerabilities they aim to fix. Hackers can even hijack patches in exceptional cases.  By testing patches before installing them, IT and security teams aim to detect and fix these problems before they impact the entire network.

5 - Patch Deployment

Patch deployment refers to both when patches are deployed and how they are deployed. Patching windows are usually set for times when few or no employees are working. Vendors' patch releases may also influence patching schedules. For example, Microsoft typically releases patches on Tuesdays, a day known as "Patch Tuesday" among some IT professionals.

IT and security teams may apply patches to batches of assets rather than rolling them out to the entire network at once. That way, some employees can continue working while others log off for patching. Applying patches in groups also provides one last chance to detect problems before they reach the whole network.

Patch deployment may also include plans to monitor assets post-patching and undo any changes that cause unanticipated problems.

6 - Patch Documentation

To ensure patch compliance, IT and security teams document the patching process, including test results, deployment results, and any assets that still need patching. This documentation keeps the asset inventory up to date and can demonstrate compliance with cybersecurity regulations in the event of an audit.

Patch Management Solutions

Because patch management is a complex lifecycle, organizations often look for ways to streamline patching. Some businesses outsource the process entirely to managed service providers (MSPs). Companies that handle patching in-house use patch management software to automate much of the process.

Most patch management software integrates with common OSs like Windows, Mac, and Linux. The software monitors assets for missing and available patches. If patches are available, patch management solutions automatically apply them in real time or on a scheduled basis. To save bandwidth, many solutions download patches to a central server and distribute them to network assets from there. Some patch management software can also automate testing, documentation, and system rollback if a patch malfunctions.

Patch management tools can be standalone software, but they're often provided as part of a larger cybersecurity solution. 

With automated patch management, organizations no longer need to monitor, approve, and apply every patch manually. This can reduce the number of critical patches that go unapplied because users can't find a convenient time to install them.