Security

Review: Tenable Vulnerability Management Helps Find Issues Before They Are Exploited

State and local governments can prioritize and mitigate dangerous, hidden vulnerabilities.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

Vulnerabilities are highly sought after by attackers who use them to launch all kinds of nefarious activities, such as stealing data, implanting ransomware, escalating administrative privileges or launching advanced attacks.

A modern enterprise network can hold thousands or even millions of vulnerabilities, more than a large IT team could likely ever fix. And for many state governments with federated IT operations, this can be an even bigger issue as the hodgepodge of semi-independent agencies and organizations each contribute their own unique stack of vulnerabilities to that mix.

The Tenable Vulnerability Management platform (formerly Tenable.io) is deployed as a service and was designed to manage environments that are saturated with potential risks. It not only finds vulnerabilities but also is smart enough to prioritize which ones need to be fixed right away and which can wait until IT teams have time to address them.

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Software Always Actively Searches for Problems

To locate vulnerabilities, the platform uses a combination of active scanning agents, passive monitoring and cloud connectors — and it is always actively searching. So, it can find new vulnerabilities quickly if, for example, a state agency connects a new device to the enterprise network or spins up a new cloud instance.

Armed with a list of thousands of discovered vulnerabilities, the Tenable Vulnerability Management platform applies machine learning, data science, threat feeds and artificial intelligence to predict which fixes need to be made quickly before they can be exploited by an attacker. It does this by going beyond the typical Common Vulnerability Scoring System used by many vulnerability management solutions to ask additional risk-based questions.

Always Searching: Uses active scanning to find new threats Thorough assessments: Prioritizes and fixes vulnerabilities based on potential damage Easy to Analyze: Tenable’s dashboard makes threat monitoring simple

The Platform Generates a Thorough Security Assessment

For example, the platform calculates how widespread a discovered vulnerability is within an enterprise, what assets are affected by the vulnerability and how easy it would be for an attacker to access and exploit it.

It also determines if there are any active threat campaigns involving that specific vulnerability occurring in the world and the potential damage that might occur if it were exploited. It then calculates an accurate Vulnerability Priority Rating score for IT teams to follow. In a test environment, the Tenable Vulnerability Management platform found over 700 vulnerabilities, but prioritized fixing only 27 of them; of those, 12 needed to be taken care of right away.

By going beyond the typical capabilities of a vulnerability scanner to fully prioritize the risk posed by individual problems, the Tenable platform can help state IT teams get ahead of their critical and dangerous backlog of vulnerabilities, fixing issues long before an attacker can exploit them.

SPECIFICATIONS

PRODUCT TYPE: Vulnerability management platform
KNOWN VULNERABILITIES DATABASE: 130,000 and expanding
USER INTERFACE: Web-based
DISTRIBUTION: As a service
LICENSE: Per seat or per user

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Informative Dashboards Readily Alert Government Admins

At its core, vulnerability management is all about numbers. Typical enterprise networks contain thousands of vulnerabilities at all levels of severity, and it’s often a race between IT teams trying to fix them and attackers trying to exploit them. In that environment, the side with the best information has a tremendous advantage, and that is what the Tenable Vulnerability Management platform does for defenders.

Tenable is well known in the industry for creating some of the best-looking and most easily readable security dashboards. It brings that same diagnostic and display technology to its vulnerability management platform. Both the dashboard and its customized reports display vulnerability data in a way that anyone can understand.

At the top level, users can see immediately all of the vulnerabilities hiding in both their on-premises and cloud-based assets. The vulnerabilities are color coded from left to right and placed in groups according to their severity.

From there, users can drill down into specific groups to better prioritize the IT team’s limited assets when fixing problems. For example, a user can select options within simple drop-down menus to see which vulnerabilities within the most critical group are currently in the news, either because they are responsible for a high-profile breach or because they are being actively exploited in large numbers. The platform will then look at threat feeds and draw a new graph that shows the answer to the specific query, conveying the requested information at a glance.

This process works for any query and is extremely simple to use. In the absence of a specific query, the platform prioritizes overall vulnerabilities that need to be fixed quickly.

Being able to prioritize information and share that with the teams working on fixing vulnerabilities — and with the CISO or CIO responsible for security overall — is an incredible advantage that is unique to the Tenable platform. More than just a splash of color, Tenable’s dashboards can help set a realistic path toward fixing the mountain of vulnerabilities that pile up in state and local enterprise networks across the country.

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