As the number of known vulnerabilities continues to grow from year to year, software development and application security teams increasingly rely on tools to identify vulnerabilities in the development process. Result: Orders are often overloaded by a continuous stream of security warnings that need to be processed, and it is obvious that it is impossible to try to fix everything.
As soon as weaknesses are detected, the teams must find a way to prioritise them. Then there’s a burning question: What needs to be corrected? How can software development organizations determine which security vulnerabilities are the most dangerous and require the most attention? How can development and security teams ensure that they do not waste valuable time on security issues that are not their greatest threat?
Methods for prioritising vulnerabilities: For each of you?
We asked our clients how they set their priorities and found that the most common aspects they take into account when determining the risk of a security breach are Vulnerability Assessments (CVSS), Ease of recovery, date of vulnerability release, popularity of the compromise project and the type of application in which the vulnerability was found.
Although each of these prioritisation methods has its merits, they are far from perfect:
#N°1 Heavy
Many application security experts rely on CVSS ratings to determine which problems need to be addressed first, as well as critical and serious problems. However, relying solely on this parameter is problematic for several reasons.
First, the distribution of severity is uneven: high and critical vulnerabilities are responsible for almost 60% of vulnerabilities, so orders still have a fairly long list of security warnings. Moreover, while the CVSS rating attempts to reflect the characteristics and impact of a security vulnerability, it does not point to risk, as risk is the effect that multiplies probability.
#2 Type of request
In other cases, the teams shall give priority to critical or sensitive requests. However, these are not necessarily the most common goals. Another problem in applying this method is that it is difficult to develop a methodology based on this parameter, because different organizations are dealing with different and subjective variables such as the user audience, the mobile or web application and more.
#3 Popularity
Some teams take the popularity of the vulnerable component into account when deciding whether it needs immediate attention and consider it to be the most attractive target for hackers. Although popular vulnerabilities in open source software attract the attention of the hacker community, there are additional parameters, and popularity is not the only determining factor when it comes to the risk level of a vulnerability.
#4. Date of publication
We found that a common practice for organizations that are unable to manage a large number of accumulated alerts is to wipe the slate clean and create an arbitrary cut-off point for old vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, according to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR): Hackers use what works, and what works doesn’t seem to change much. Second, attackers automate certain vulnerabilities with weapons, pulverize them and pray for them on the Internet, sometimes with incredible results.
#5 Easy Healing
Another popular method is to prioritize the vulnerabilities that are easiest to fix. Although this can help teams solve many problems in a short time, it is no guarantee that they will solve the most urgent problems.
WhiteSource report – DevSecOps Insights 2020 report
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No prioritisation method = friction, loss of time and unnecessary risk
Unfortunately, there is currently no gold standard for prioritizing vulnerabilities. Each company, and sometimes different teams within the same organisation, set priorities in their own way. Not surprisingly, our recently published DevSecOps Insights report shows that application security experts have identified prioritization of vulnerabilities as an important issue in the implementation and execution of their AppSec programs.
Prioritising vulnerabilities has become a problem, and in the absence of generally accepted standards or best practices, it often takes a long time to develop and protect them when it comes to determining which vulnerabilities need to be addressed first. The best way to prioritize is to solve a puzzle that many development teams are still trying to solve.
Meanwhile, teams make special decisions or follow individual instructions and are confronted with many friction losses along the way. This inevitably leads to an even greater waste of time and the risk of missing out on the most critical weaknesses.
Priority setting: One step beyond detection
Organizations need to find a way to prioritize without abandoning the seemingly endless list of security alerts they now have to consider. Solution: Vulnerability detection tools with robust, built-in prioritization technology that save time and resources to investigate vulnerabilities and discuss what needs to be resolved first.
The next generation of vulnerability detection tools enables teams to take a step forward and focus on the most critical vulnerabilities by combining prioritization and vulnerability detection, enabling teams to address the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk of impact on their systems.
Getting Priority of Vulnerability
The future of automatic prioritization of vulnerabilities provides practical knowledge and recommendations to address them. In the security alarm mountain, it automatically detects security holes that actually affect code and provides a precise location so developers can easily find and fix them.
This innovative approach helps teams to be more flexible in setting priorities and to quickly identify and correct the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest threat to application security. No loss of time, friction or discussions about which weaknesses come first. A new generation of detection instruments is given the right priority so that organizations can deliver safe products in a timely manner.
*** This is the syndicate Blog Security Bloggers Network from Blog – WhiteSource, written by Patricia Johnson. The original message can be found at the following address: https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/vulnerability-prioritization.application security checklist, nist,security and privacy policy recommendations,it security checklist best practices,web application security best practices pdf,web application security best practices owasp,application security best practices checklist,cyber security predictions 2020,gartner security predictions 2020,security predictions 2019,cyber security forecast 2019,cybersecurity predictions 2021,trendmicro security predictions for 2020,owasp testing tools,owasp testing checklist,owasp api testing guide,otg-info-001,owasp mobile testing guide,owasp testing guide,application security architecture best practices,research on the internet for best practices in security testing for software development,application security and development checklist,what is application level security,application security guidelines,cloud application security checklist,desktop application security,security measures in web application
