Get Faster Vulnerability Response with Milestone’s ActivateVR

A day doesn’t go by when there ISN’T a data breach of some kind that embarrasses a company. Google Fi, T-Mobile, MailChimp, and Norton Life Lock have all had incursions in the past six weeks. In fact, our resident SecOps guru, Barry Stewart, just posted an alert on Jan. 19, 2023, about vulnerability CVE-2022-47966, which allows attackers to gain high, system-level access without authentication. And these were just the big attacks that made the news.

Of course, along with this plethora of continuous attacks, there has been exponential growth in the security and vulnerability management market. In 2001, the global Security and Vulnerability Management Market was valued at $11.26B in 2021 and is expected to reach $21.38B by 2028 with a CAGR of 9.6% over the forecast period.

The Real Question: Are You Responding to Vulnerability Threats Quickly Enough?

Although thinking about how to prevent vulnerability attacks is top of mind, just as important is how quickly you respond to such attacks that actually occur. From your run-of-the-mill viruses/worms to more sophisticated malware, botnets, phishing, DDoS, ransomware—you name it, it’s out there. Time is of the essence when you’re thinking about your vulnerability response.

The problem is that industry vulnerability response tools haven’t changed much. Unfortunately, time is often not the first thing on IT’s mind, not because it’s not important, but because of the tools they have at their disposal to address vulnerability attacks. Sure, there’s software that monitors and alerts, but addressing vulnerabilities is often done the 20th-century way with emails, phone calls, ad-hoc meetings, and—dare I say it—spreadsheets.

This type of “solution” doesn’t lend itself to speed. And when someone exploits a security vulnerability on-premise, your response time is of the utmost importance because you can assume being able to access high-stakes privileges on a compromised system will lead to attacks destroying data or taking control of computers.

3 Steps to Improve Vulnerability Response Times

To improve your response time to vulnerability attacks, you should take a few things into account:

1. Automating to speed things up

Gone are the days of manually keeping track of threats on a spreadsheet. With the amount of data that can be exploited, you often don’t know what to patch first. Automating vulnerability triage such as scanning, penetration testing, and vulnerability notifications would help in your response to incursions.

2. Discovering a breach means you’re already behind the curve

Once you’ve found out your systems have been breached, it’s pretty much too late. You need to reduce your vulnerabilities on your critical assets by reducing vulnerabilities across your attack surface and prioritizing remediation based on the risks posed to your organization.

3. Patching vulnerabilities in real time

One of the important factors in vulnerability management is removing/neutralizing high-risk vulnerabilities before your network and sensitive assets are compromised. You do this by applying available patches as they are deployed.

Milestone’s ActivateVR Stops Vulnerability Attacks in Their Tracks

Milestone’s ActivateVR (ServiceNow’s Vulnerability Management) cybersecurity delivery model is unique and tailored to the needs of chief information security officers (CISOs) and vulnerability managers. Our accelerated go-live environment is followed by multiphase hyper-care support where our team responsively deploys new security enhancements by taking into account your unique experiences.

But we don’t then just cut and run. Our delivery model ensures you are satisfied with our work, and we’ll address any questions or concerns you may have about our vulnerability response. Plus, with ActivateVR, you get vulnerability management on steroids. ActivateVR identifies, reports, manages, and remediates vulnerabilities using our holistic and efficient scoping to deliver above client expectations every time that includes:

• Rapid Response Time. ActivateVR empowers CISOs with the tools to aggressively target and remediate vulnerabilities throughout the enterprise. The latest edition of Rapid7’s annual Vulnerability Intelligence Report found that the average time to known exploitation of vulnerabilities is down to 12 days – markedly down from the 42 days recorded in last year’s edition of the same study.
• Faster Vulnerability Identification: 47% of security leaders report they have a backlog of applications that have been identified as vulnerable – accelerating the identification process makes the unsustainable manageable.
• Better Vulnerability Prioritization: ActivateVR allows you to prioritize vulnerabilities and your response time based on an unlimited number of factors, including severity, threats, asset exposure, business criticality, and security controls. Exceptions can be raised and dispatched to risk owners.
• Hassle-free Remediation and Risk Exposure: When you can identify and prioritize vulnerabilities faster, your remediation activities also benefit. Accelerating the remediation process immediately reduces your risk exposure, especially when responding to recent high-risk vulnerabilities like the WannaCry ransomware attack.
• Dramatic Reduction in Administrative Overhead: With an impressive reduction in administrative overhead across the entire business, many organizations can expect major savings when they ActivateVR.

Milestone Helps Your Organization Meet Vulnerabilities Head On

When addressing vulnerabilities in your organization, your IT department and Security teams need to work together by:

Designing appropriate second-phased projects

With ServiceNow Vulnerability Response, you give your cybersecurity team a visual representation of their vulnerability management maturity, and they have the ability to design appropriate second-phase projects.

Minimizing costs by reducing manpower

Cybersecurity professionals traditionally do not have the resource burden available to manage ServiceNow platforms. We’re saving them possibly 2-3 FTEs and, operationally, presenting a clear leadership roadmap that allows them to enhance capabilities to business goals.

Experienced SecOps professional with 5-Star CSAT

A lot of customers only want to partner with people who have done this type of work before and can show it – we have done this type of implementation for global household brands successfully with 5-star CSAT. There are not many partners in the ecosystem with this kind of pedigree.

Some Questions You May Have About Whether You Need ActivateVR

• I already have Vulnerability Assessment. Why do I need ActivateVR? You need more than just a vulnerability scanner; you must choose what to work on first. ActivateVR lets you auto-prioritize based on asset impact and business value, improve triage, and automate assignments to the responsible IT teams.
• How do I know if my CMDB is mature enough to use ActivateVR? Milestone has decades of configuration management database (CMDB) experience and a service offering designed to enhance your CMDB. We’ll configure your scanner integrations by creating or updating CMDB records to supplement CMDB.

ActivateVR integrates the client vulnerability scanners (Qualys/ Rapid7/ Tenable) with your ServiceNow instance. Demand for this correlates with demand for the scanners, especially in large-scale environments where workforce coordination is more complex and creates a challenge.

With over 50 years of combined cybersecurity experience on our bench, our ActivateVR team is:

• Experts in both Cybersecurity and ServiceNow
• Earned industry certifications, such as CISSP and CISA
• Hold current ServiceNow certifications

This, combined with our decades of experience, allows CISCOs and cybersecurity teams to be confident of executing on time, on budget with quality when partnering with Milestone on their next security initiative.

Find out how Milestone’s ActivateVR stops attacks in their tracks by contacting us.