Greater than 40,000 new vulnerabilities (CVEs) have been printed in 2024 alone. Greater than 60% of these have been labeled “excessive” or “essential.” Sounds scary, positive, however what number of of them truly put your atmosphere in danger?
Not almost as many as you would possibly assume.
Scoring techniques like CVSS flag severity based mostly on technical elements. However they don’t know your community, your controls, or the way you’ve hardened key property. That’s an issue. As a result of with out context, groups spend an excessive amount of time chasing scary-looking bugs that will already be blocked, and miss the quiet ones that aren’t.
This publish breaks down why conventional vulnerability prioritization typically leads you astray, and the way a greater strategy, publicity validationhelps groups deal with what’s actually exploitable.
What’s the Downside With “Essential” Vulnerabilities?
Let’s begin with the numbers. Vulnerability disclosures jumped 38% final yr. And lots of instruments, scanners, patching platforms, and dashboards nonetheless type them by uncooked CVSS or EPSS scores.
However right here’s the factor: these are simply world scores. Which means, as a result of a vulnerability scores a 9.8 on paper, it doesn’t imply it has a essential influence in your atmosphere. Your firewall, EDR, IPS/IDS, or segmentation would possibly already cease the exploit chilly. In the meantime, that “medium” severity situation buried decrease on the record? It might truly be a ticking time bomb.
There’s additionally the pace of weaponization. In early 2024, greater than half of exploited vulnerabilities have been become working exploits shortly after public disclosure. Attackers transfer quick, typically quicker than defenders can react. And whereas new vulnerabilities seize headlines, many breaches nonetheless come all the way down to older flaws we already find out about however haven’t patched in time.
What we have now right here isn’t a discovery downside, it’s a prioritization downside.
Why Conventional Scoring Falls Quick
Let’s break down how the same old techniques work.
(The) CVSS offers you a severity score based mostly on entry necessities, privileges, and potential influence.
EPSS predicts the probability of exploitation utilizing exterior menace indicators.
CISA KEV flags recognized exploited vulnerabilities.
Useful? Certain, in big-picture phrases, sure. However as useful as they’re, in principle, these techniques don’t know your particular atmosphere.
They’ll’t inform in case your IPS blocks the exploit, if the asset is remoted, or if the system even issues. In order that they deal with all networks the identical, which might simply result in losing time and sources on the unsuitable fixes as a consequence of a way of false urgency.
Exchange guesswork with proof.
See how Picus validates your dangers towards actual assaults and focuses your efforts on exposures you really want to repair.
What Is Publicity Validation?
Publicity Validation flips the method. As a substitute of guessing how unhealthy a vulnerability could be, it exams whether or not it’s truly exploitable in your precise atmosphere.
It’s like working secure, managed assault simulations, utilizing real-world adversarial methods, to see if the whole kill chain of the exploitation marketing campaign works on you. In case your controls cease it, nice. If not, now you recognize what to repair.
The objective is easy: exchange assumptions with proof. This fashion, you may repair the vulnerabilities that matter essentially the most, first.
The Tech Behind It: BAS + Automated Pentests
Publicity Validation depends on two varieties of secure, non-destructive instruments.
Breach and Assault Simulation (BAS): BAS runs steady assault situations utilizing recognized ways and malware behaviors documented within the wild. Consider them as a approach to examine whether or not your EDR, SIEM, and firewall are catching what they’re alleged to, towards each recognized and rising threats.
Automated Penetration Testing: This system mimics the actions of an attacker who already has entry to your atmosphere, testing how far they might go, as soon as they’re inside. This contains lateral motion, privilege escalation, credential entry, and makes an attempt to succeed in delicate targets like area admins. It additionally frees up your pink group to deal with extra advanced, artistic, or essential assault paths.
Working collectively, these instruments assist your groups perceive what attackers might actually do in your community, not simply what could be theoretically doable.
When a CVSS Rating of 9.4 Isn’t Essential
Let’s see how this works in observe. Say a scanner flags a vulnerability with a CVSS rating of 9.4. That sounds severe. However publicity validation places it to the check.
First step: Is there a public exploit?
Sure. There’s a proof of idea obtainable. However it’s not plug-and-play. It takes technical ability and a few particular situations to succeed. That makes this vulnerability much less essential than it first seems, and the chance is adjusted to mirror that. This by itself drops the rating to eight.7.
Subsequent: Can your defenses cease it?
Now it’s time to examine your safety stack: cloud controls, community protections, endpoint instruments, and SIEM guidelines. If these are already detecting or blocking the assault, the chance drops considerably.
On this case, your breach and assault simulation resolution exhibits that your present controls are doing their job, bringing the vuln’s rating down to six.0.
Final examine: Does the system matter?
The susceptible asset just isn’t essential. It doesn’t maintain delicate knowledge and doesn’t influence core operations. With that in thoughts, the rating drops once more, this time to 2.4.
On this situation, the scanner all however screamed it had a vulnerability with a 9.4 rating and it was essential that you simply pay it some severe consideration. Nevertheless, in your real-world atmosphere, this vuln could be blocked and detected, letting you cope with much more essential vulnerabilities to your org. That is what publicity validation does. It differentiates the true dangers from the noise, letting you repair what issues and transfer on from what doesn’t.
A Smarter Technique to Prioritize
Picus Safety’s Publicity Validation (EXV) resolution helps groups transfer previous surface-level scores and deal with what’s actual.
We mix assault floor administration, breach and assault simulation, and automatic pentesting collectively to see whether or not a vulnerability could be exploited in your precise atmosphere.
Then it calculates a threat rating that displays actual situations, not simply worst-case assumptions. That rating takes into consideration three key elements:
Is the vulnerability actually exploitable?
Are your present controls already blocking it?
Does the affected system truly matter to your group and its every day operations?
Armed with this context, your groups now not need to chase down each high-severity alert. You get a transparent, manageable record of exposures confirmed to matter to your corporation and its atmosphere with far much less noise.
Outcomes From the Subject
When groups cease counting on uncooked CVSS scores and begin validating exposures, they begin seeing outcomes instantly.
As Picus, we’ve seen organizations minimize their essential vulnerability rely by greater than half, from 63 % to simply 10 %. Identical atmosphere. Identical instruments. The one change was verifying what might truly be exploited.
That shift saves hours of patching, clears out the noise, and most significantly, lets safety groups extra successfully deal with actual threats and successfully cease chasing ghosts.
As a substitute of flooding workflows with tons of of high-severity findings, groups get a clear, targeted record of what actually issues. Much less time spent arguing over priorities. Extra time fixing actual points.
Validation turns vulnerability administration into one thing actionable. You progress quicker, waste much less, and shield what actually issues.
Remaining Ideas
You don’t want to repair all the pieces. You simply want to repair what’s actual.
Publicity validation helps groups transfer previous uncooked severity scores and begin making selections based mostly on knowledge.
The end result? Higher prioritization, stronger defenses, and a safer group.
Study extra about Picus Safety’s Publicity Validation (EXV) resolution.
Sponsored and written by Pico Safety.
