When it comes to vulnerability management, time is critical - every minute a vulnerability goes unaddressed, the risk escalates. To ensure all risks are addressed, security teams need vulnerability management processes that are reliable and efficient, and, crucially, don’t drain their resources. And given that 22% of cybersecurity professionals have admitted to ignoring an alert completely, we can’t afford to rely on the human element alone.
This is why so many organizations turn to automation and orchestration when their vulnerability management processes become a blocker to progress. Automation and orchestration not only speeds up the identification, analysis, and remediation of vulnerabilities, it can also help improve decision-making by connecting relevant tools and providing analysts with better insights, faster.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how security teams use Tines to enhance these processes, and how automated vulnerability management can deliver meaningful benefits for the entire organization.
What is vulnerability management?
Vulnerability management is the ongoing process of identifying, assessing, reporting on, managing, and remediating aspects of a company’s network, workloads, or systems that could be compromised.
Unlike threat intelligence teams, vulnerability management teams are focused on internal factors or actors.
Their key responsibilities include:
Finding vulnerabilities:
Regularly scanning and assessing the organization's IT systems and networks
Using vulnerability scanning tools (VirusTotal, RunZero, CrowdStrike) to detect weaknesses in software, hardware, and configurations
Assessing risk:
Exploring the potential impact of identified vulnerabilities
Prioritizing based on impact, considering exploitability, potential damage, and the criticality of affected systems
Patch management:
Coordinating timely patches and updates to remediate identified vulnerabilities
Developing and implementing processes to ensure that security patches are applied efficiently and effectively
Testing and validating the effectiveness in a controlled environment
Collaboration, documentation, communication:
Working across teams in the security and IT orgs
Keeping track of identified vulnerabilities in a consistent way
Documenting remediation steps and recommended actions
Sharing vulnerability information with relevant stakeholders in a clear, concise way
Monitoring and reporting:
Consistent, continuous monitoring tactics that assess impact
Building and distributing vulnerability reports, remediation, and impact on security posture.
5 common challenges with vulnerability management
Let's take a closer look at some of the challenges that vulnerability managers, researchers, and analysts face:
1. Complexity of IT environments
Modern IT infrastructures are becoming increasingly complex, with a mix of on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid environments. Managing vulnerabilities across this diverse landscape can be challenging, as each environment may have different configurations, technologies, and security requirements.
2. Volume and diversity of vulnerabilities
The sheer volume and diversity of vulnerabilities pose a challenge for vulnerability management teams. With thousands of new vulnerabilities reported each year across various software, hardware, and devices, prioritizing which vulnerabilities to address first becomes a daunting task.
3. Patch management challenges
Patch management is a critical aspect of vulnerability management, but it can be challenging to implement effectively. Organizations often struggle with patching systems in a timely manner due to concerns about compatibility issues, system downtime, and the need for thorough testing before deployment.
4. Skill shortages and resource constraints
The cybersecurity skills gap has been widely reported on, with many organizations struggling to recruit and retain qualified personnel to effectively manage vulnerabilities. Limited budget and resources further exacerbate the problem, making it difficult to implement robust vulnerability management programs.
5. Rapidly evolving threat landscape
The threat landscape is constantly evolving, with cybercriminals exploiting new vulnerabilities and attack vectors to bypass security controls. Vulnerability management teams must stay abreast of emerging threats, zero-day vulnerabilities, and advanced persistent threats (APTs) to effectively protect their organizations' assets
Deploy one of the 50+ pre-built vulnerability management workflows in our library for free by signing up for our Community Edition.
3 key benefits of using automation and orchestration to enhance vulnerability management
There are three main reasons why security teams turn to security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms for vulnerability management:
1. Faster response times
Automation enables rapid identification and remediation of vulnerabilities by automatically triggering alerts, notifications, and responses based on predefined criteria. This helps the team address vulnerabilities promptly, reducing the window of opportunity for potential exploitation.
Automation also helps vulnerability management teams prioritize remediation. By analyzing and correlating data from various sources, teams can generate insights based on factors such as severity, exploitability, and potential impact. These allow them to focus efforts on addressing the most critical vulnerabilities first.
2. Greater consistency and accuracy
Automated processes ensure consistency in vulnerability detection and response across systems and environments. By eliminating manual intervention, the likelihood of human errors and oversights is significantly reduced, leading to more accurate vulnerability assessments and remediation efforts.
They can help teams with compliance management by automatically generating reports, documenting remediation efforts, and ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements and industry standards.
3. Scalability
As organizations grow and IT infrastructures become more complex, scalability becomes crucial. Automation and orchestration allows vulnerability management teams to scale their operations efficiently without proportional increases in resources. Platforms with robust automation and orchestration capabilities can handle large volumes of data and tasks, enabling the team to manage vulnerabilities across diverse systems and networks effectively.
This includes plugging into the sprawl of other security tools and platforms such as SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems, threat intelligence feeds, and ticketing systems. This integration enables seamless information sharing, correlation of security events, and coordinated response efforts across the organization's security ecosystem.
Case study #1: Greenlight
In a live webinar, Maxwell Zhou and June Pham, Staff Security Engineers at Greenlight, shared how building vulnerability management workflows in Tines has saved them time, eliminated manual triage, and reduced onboarding time for new security team hires.
We've saved a lot of time by having Tines doing the work for us - we're saving roughly 30 hours every week. And we can spend that time building more programs that help secure our product.
June Pham, Staff Security Engineer
Case study #2: BCM One
In the wake of a malware outbreak and insufficient Endpoint Detection Response (EDR), BCM One needed to reconstruct its security program from the ground up. Through their implementation of CrowdStrike, they discovered a high volume of vulnerabilities (1.1M) and a patching program that frequently missed SLA targets. Tines offered a flexible, scalable way to connect their relevant tools, and enhance and streamline vulnerability management.
Key workflow: vulnerability notification system
One of BCM One’s workflows involved building a notification system based on CrowdStrike tags. It tags assets and sends an email to all server owners with an app vulnerability or a software vulnerability. That notification will include an action for the owner to take, such as upgrading to a specific patch version.
In their own words:
“We used the tools we’ve bought, from CrowdStrike to RunZero, much more effectively because we have Tines.” - Dan Rubins, VP of IT and Information Security
Case study #3: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory faced two challenges that automation could help with - adhering to the Zero Trust framework in a short timeframe and managing a rotating security automation team. With Tines, they made automation accessible to their whole team. This meant they could build, run, and monitor vulnerability management workflows without engineering resources.
Key workflow: vulnerability analysis
This workflow gathers entire network information from databases via their APIs and updates Tenable with over two million IP addresses in a matter of seconds. This helps the team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory evaluate and break down those IP addresses for vulnerabilities, evaluate the data, and then push it to Tenable.
In their own words:
“The sheer time savings are immeasurable because it wasn’t even possible before” - Mike Crider, Cyber Vulnerability Analyst, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Tines for vulnerability management
What is Tines?
Tines is a smart, secure workflow builder that powers the world's most important workflows, including many security orchestration, automation, and response workflows.
Security teams, including practitioners at Mars, McKesson, Snowflake, and Elastic use Tines workflows to operate more effectively, mitigate risk, and reduce tech debt to free up time and focus on the work that matters most.
Why security teams choose Tines for vulnerability management
Tines stands out from other SOAR solutions because of its intuitive and flexible design.
Teams at McKesson, Mars, Turo, BCM One, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and many more use Tines to automate and optimize their vulnerability management processes.
Some of the benefits Tines customers regularly call out in reviews and case studies:
Accessible for the whole team. Tines is instantly legible with a short learning curve, so new and junior team members can start building workflows right away.
Designed for collaboration. With Tines, teams can work together in real time, experiment safely, and control sensitive shared data.
An integrator across the entire tech stack. Security teams can use Tines to connect any internal or external technology.
Secure by design. Tines was built by security practitioners and designed to empower all teams to work securely.
Enterprise-grade. Tines offers transparency and compliance, without sacrificing speed and scale.
Easy to report on. Automated reporting dashboards help teams measure success and share the impact with key stakeholders.
Works in any environment. Whether self-hosted or hybrid cloud, teams can deploy Tines on any combination of environments.
Increased value from existing tools. Customers get additional value from their security tools by connecting them through Tines.
Vulnerability management technologies commonly used with Tines
While Tines can connect to any tool or system that offers an API, there are some tools that are particularly popular among vulnerability management teams.
They include:
Recorded Future: Threat intelligence cloud platform enabling organizations to identify and mitigate threats across cyber, supply-chain, physical and fraud domains.
Wiz: Security platform that scans entire cloud infrastructures and gives complete visibility into anything that runs in it, raising vulnerabilities and bringing them to the forefront.
Tenable: Vulnerability management solution that helps identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities across various environments.
Qualys: A cloud-based solution that detects vulnerabilities on all networked assets.
CrowdStrike: Provides endpoint protection and vulnerability data that can be orchestrated within Tines workflows for streamlined management.
Greynoise: A security platform that collects and analyzes Internet-wide scan and attack traffic.
Sysdig: Container and cloud-native security platform that provides runtime threat detection and vulnerability management.
VirusTotal: Provides analysis of suspicious files and URLs, enhancing the vulnerability management lifecycle.
RunZero: Assists in identifying and managing assets, ensuring comprehensive coverage in vulnerability scans.
URLScan: Enhances vulnerability analysis by automating the scanning of URLs for potential threats.
IOCparser: Tool for extracting IOCs and intelligence from different data sources.
Pre-built workflows for vulnerability management
Let’s look at some pre-built workflows from the Tines Library, which are easy to import to your tenant and adapt to meet your team’s needs.
Don’t have a Tines account? You can sign up for the always-free Community Edition. Free access includes three active workflows and 5000 daily events.
These workflows are just a sample of what you’ll find in the Tines library, which is home to 700+ pre-built workflows and 50+ pre-built workflows specifically for vulnerability management.
Pre-built workflows
Vulnerability management
Get inspiration for ways to automate the entire vulnerability lifecycle.
Generate new vulnerability scan reports with Qualys
Tools: Qualys
Fetch and record CrowdStrike Spotlight vulnerabilities with Jira
Tools: Automox, CrowdStrike, Jira Software
Retrieve software vulnerabilities from Fleet for a given host
Tools: Fleet
By Dave Herder at Fleet
Analyze vulnerabilities from Tenable workbench
Tools: GreyNoise, Jira Software, Slack, Tenable Vulnerability Management
Close Jira tickets if JupiterOne vulnerabilities are resolved
Tools: Jira Software, JupiterOne
Getting started with Tines for vulnerability management
It’s easy for security teams to get overwhelmed by vulnerability management. Between the constant influx of new vulnerabilities and the complexity of environments, there are countless challenges to overcome.
This is where a platform like Tines comes in. Security teams can use Tines to automate the entire vulnerability management lifecycle, ensuring fast response times, and consistent and accurate detection and response. This enables vulnerability management teams to scale operations efficiently, while unlocking more time to focus on high-impact tasks that matter most.