Modern cloud environments can’t be that hard to protect, right?
Wrong.
Security teams need to continuously identify and remediate vulnerabilities, which, for most businesses, means identification alone creates an endless volume of tasks.
Automatically detecting vulnerabilities is a good thing for any organization — solving them at scale is hard.
Alert fatigue can harm job satisfaction, team morale, and workforce utilization. It’s a bigger problem than it seems at first glance.
So, how can you boost security and job satisfaction while preventing alert fatigue?
It starts with context because not all vulnerabilities are created equal. For example, addressing a low CVSS for a critical application may take priority over a high CVSS in a sandbox account.
That’s where vulnerability management comes into the picture.
Vulnerability management prioritization keeps teams focused on the most critical and potentially dangerous issues facing the cloud environment.
This post will explore how the seemingly straightforward process of vulnerability can make or break your cloud security while providing tips to help you do it the right way.
Why Vulnerability Prioritization Is Critical in Cloud Environments
Cloud environments are now commonplace for modern businesses, but adequately protecting them isn’t easy.
There are seemingly endless possible vulnerabilities facing the expanding attack surface of cloud environments, especially as different services and cloud providers are integrated.
Effective cloud security relies on several moving pieces, and it’s too common for some to be inadequate or missing. One key step is vulnerability identification, a standard security practice, but often done with tools that generate a high volume of alerts — overwhelming security teams with an onslaught of notifications.
Known as alert fatigue, it can lead to critical alerts drowning in the sea of more mundane alerts, keeping vulnerabilities unmitigated and ripe for exploitation. Prioritizing vulnerability remediation requires the right strategies and practices that focus on your organization’s most severe threats.
Without the right prioritization processes in place, teams will do their best to wade through alerts to protect the cloud environment. Still, critical alerts will inevitably be overlooked or drown in the sea of less severe vulnerabilities.
Common Types of Cloud Vulnerabilities
Cloud environments face many possible vulnerabilities, especially as they continue expanding and interacting with other cloud services. Let’s break down a few common types of cloud vulnerabilities that you’ll need to guard against, such as:
- A simple misconfiguration can enable a major attack or cause unexpected downtime, and the more cloud services you use, the greater the opportunity for a misconfiguration.
- Unsecured APIs allow anyone with a terminal to make API calls that might grant them access to sensitive data or systems.
- Inadequate access management can lead to more severe impacts from compromised credentials, as employees are given too much access.
- Human error is unavoidable, but minimizing possible impacts and quickly identifying errors goes far in preventing attacks.
- Internal or external bad actors can exploit the above vulnerabilities when targeting sensitive data or accessing one of your partner’s systems.
Automated systems can identify many of the cloud vulnerabilities mentioned earlier. However, if the process ends with alerts, your teams will have too many alerts, making it difficult to prioritize, address, and remediate severe vulnerabilities.
Cloud vulnerability prioritization is an often underestimated but highly important aspect of cloud security. Enacting the right strategies and practices can reduce the threats facing your organization.
Key Strategies for Cloud Vulnerability Prioritization
How can you keep your cloud environments secure while avoiding alert fatigue that can bog down security teams? Building out effective vulnerability prioritization processes is the key to effectiveness and security.
So, we’ll break down a few effective strategies so you can start bolstering your prioritization processes and security posture.
Leverage Risk-Based Prioritization
Risk-based prioritization should be the foundation of an effective remediation strategy that doesn’t overwhelm security teams with alerts. However, it’s important to evaluate risks based on the threat they actually pose to an organization and the real-world impact the attack might have.
Attack-based vulnerability prioritization helps you prioritize vulnerabilities based on how an attacker would realistically exploit them rather than analyze vulnerabilities in a vacuum. Risk-scoring frameworks are well worth using, but they run the risk of not considering the full context, which can lead to incorrect prioritization.
Configurable prioritization systems can help align efforts with how your overall risk management practices, such as the possible impact of specific types of attacks.
Evaluate the Complete Context
The context behind the vulnerability is critical for accurate prioritization and the provision of actionable information to security analysts. A risk score alone is a good starting point, but it’s far from the only step involved in scoring and prioritization.
In addition to the score, other aspects of the vulnerability should be considered, such as:
- Is it encrypted?
- Who can access it?
- What is the realistic impact of the vulnerability being exploited?
- Is it accessible from the Internet?
- Is it associated with any sensitive data?
“It” might be any vulnerability found by an automated system that will likely be misinterpreted without considering the complete context behind the vulnerability.
Always Avoid Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue isn’t just bad for morale — it’s bad for security, too. A team that’s overwhelmed with alerts will struggle to move through them and may overlook critical alerts that get lost in the fray.
Effective prioritization keeps your teams focused on context-rich alerts for high-priority vulnerabilities rather than wading through emails of vulnerabilities treated the same or incorrectly prioritized. This often means configuring your systems correctly from the start to allow you to better control and anticipate the flow of alerts.
Having the right processes and platforms in place that aggregate, remove duplicates, and prioritize alerts is an ongoing focus to help teams avoid fatigue.
Best Practices for Cloud Vulnerability Prioritization
Finding cloud vulnerabilities is only the beginning of a robust security posture. The issues your tools or technicians find need to be remediated but have different levels of severity that should be considered when prioritizing workflows.
How do you make sure identified vulnerabilities are effectively prioritized so security teams can maximize the impact of every workday? We’ll explore a few core best practices that can help you prioritize cloud vulnerabilities the right way.
Adopt One or More Risk Scoring Frameworks
Scoring frameworks play an important role in helping you understand a specific vulnerability. These frameworks are also compatible with automated systems, simplifying initial prioritization for detected vulnerabilities.
Fortunately, these frameworks save you from needing to create a way to prioritize vulnerabilities from scratch. Popular frameworks like Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) are widely used to help analysts evaluate vulnerabilities.
You can leverage these score frameworks to create a vulnerability prioritization matrix to streamline vulnerability analysis. However, remember that these scoring frameworks don’t always account for company-specific context, which may impact how vulnerabilities are prioritized.
Stay Aware of the Expanding Attack Surface
Every new cloud service expands your attack surface, giving threat actors more attack vectors to explore and exploit.
However, adopting new tools or platforms isn’t the only way cloud environments expand. The cloud services you use may start working with new vendors, partners, or infrastructure — and that directly affects how you protect your cloud environment.
Staying aware of how these attack surfaces can grow and expand beyond your own decisions is vital to accurately identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities.
Tactfully Use Automated Tools
Organizations need effective vulnerability prioritization technology and processes to remediate severe vulnerabilities as quickly as possible without losing track of lower-severity threats.
Automated tools can go far in identifying vulnerabilities, especially as it’s borderline impossible to rely on human experts to find every possible issue facing cloud environments. Keep in mind, these tools should be used tactfully as part of an overarching strategy.
It’s also important to remember automated tools can often create alert fatigue or may fail to provide cybersecurity professionals with enough context. That’s why having humans in the loop is critical to verify findings, help determine priority, and provide full context.
Adopt Meaningful Cloud Vulnerability Prioritization with Tamnoon
Cloud environments aren’t going anywhere, and leaving them inadequately protected can devastate your business. Cloud vulnerability prioritization that considers actual risks, context, and possible impact is critical in protecting everything connected to the cloud.
However, human expertise must be involved at every step, from identification to remediation. Over-reliance on automated platforms can lead to misunderstandings or incorrect prioritization of vulnerabilities.
That’s why Tamnoon combines the benefits of AI with battle-tested human intelligence. Combined, we aggregate, de-duplicate, and prioritize vulnerability alerts to remediate before bad actors discover them.
Looking to leave alert fatigue in the past and improve the way you remediate alerts in your cloud? Book a demo today to learn how Tamnoon aggregates and prioritizes your alerts based on your requirements so you’re ready to prevent whatever threats you face.
