Reducing Remediation Time Remains a Challenge: How Tenable Vulnerability Watch Can Help

Timely vulnerability remediation is an ongoing challenge for organizations as they struggle to prioritize the exposures that represent the greatest risk to their operations. Existing scoring systems are invaluable but can lack context. Here’s how Tenable’s Vulnerability Watch classification system can help.

Background

Over the past six years working in Tenable’s research organization, I’ve watched known vulnerabilities and zero-day flaws plague organizations in the immediate aftermath of disclosure or even years afterwards. Following each blog post or threat report we’ve published, I kept coming back to the same question: Why are so many organizations struggling to remediate vulnerabilities in a timely manner?

As someone who followed the evolution of COVID-19 variants throughout the beginning of the pandemic, I saw that the World Health Organization (WHO) began to label new variants under a classification system as the virus began to mutate. This classification system was designed to help prioritization efforts for monitoring and research. It included accessible labels like variants of interest and variants of concern to help communicate urgency and focus global attention.

I began to wonder: What if we borrowed from the same type of classification system used by the WHO and applied it to vulnerability intelligence? Numeric-based systems like the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) provide mechanisms for prioritization based on scoring. However, they don’t always provide enough context to help decision makers. So, what if we used simple, clear and status-based terminology to communicate risks surrounding vulnerabilities in order to guide action?

This led us to develop Vulnerability Watch, a classification system for vulnerabilities inspired by the WHO’s classification of COVID-19 variants. Vulnerability Watch is a small, but important part of Tenable’s Vulnerability Intelligence offering that was launched in 2024. Now, in addition to being available in product, Vulnerability Watch classifications can be found on the Tenable CVE page, as well as within individual CVE pages for select vulnerabilities that have been classified under the Vulnerability Watch

[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.