"Combating Vulnerability Fatigue With Automated Security Validation"

Log monitoring, firewall, and antivirus technologies have been valuable tools for alerting IT teams about suspicious network behavior, but the underlying technologies that support security teams in their day-to-day operations have remained the same as digital transformation continues. It has become more difficult to differentiate between benign and malicious behavior as attacks grow in sophistication. Threat actors behind such attacks often now use legitimate operating systems and are harder to detect within regular network behavior. Not all suspicious behavior is malicious, making what was intended to provide useful insight into network activity a challenge for many security professionals. Using the wrong toolset to deal with a problem leads to reverse evolution, as seen in the vulnerability management market, where tools increasingly become a distraction to security professionals. Security teams are flooded with long lists of community-prioritized vulnerabilities because of legacy vulnerability management tools. There were over 15,000 vulnerabilities discovered only in 2020, 8 percent of which were exploited by attackers. This problem is described as a cat and mouse game, with security teams chasing a continuously growing list of vulnerabilities without knowing whether they fixed the ones that attackers actually want to abuse, exposed the most critical vulnerabilities, checked if an active exploit exists for a specific flaw, or analyzed the potential impact of the vulnerability. Security and IT teams need all that context to effectively reduce risk, maintain business continuity, and stay ahead of adversaries. Automated security validation can allow security teams to get ahead of the vulnerability curve by pinpointing the most critical vulnerabilities, which would help combat vulnerability fatigue and more. This article continues to discuss vulnerability management challenges faced by security teams and how automated security validation differs from legacy vulnerability management. 

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