The DevSecOps Guide to Vulnerability Prioritization

While Application Security Testing (AST) technologies are excellent at surfacing code flaws that could lead to vulnerabilities, they can generate floods of potential issues – many of which pose no real security risk – which has created a need for effective vulnerability prioritization.

Security testing tools generate long backlogs of potential security issues. Some may be exploitable in production and provide access to sensitive information, while others may end up in mundane staging environments. Manually combing through these backlogs to determine which issues are real, and which are harmless can be tedious and time-consuming at best. Actually solving each issue is usually infeasible.

For this reason, security teams need intelligent vulnerability prioritization that can automatically determine which issues introduce real security risk, and which can be ignored. It's a matter of separating the signal from the noise.

The Importance of Prioritizing Security Vulnerabilities

By properly prioritizing security vulnerabilities, teams can allocate their resources better, focusing on high-risk threats to prevent breaches and mitigate severe impacts without wasting time and effort on harmless issues. Security testing tools may surface legitimate code flaws, but it doesn’t mean security teams should spend their time addressing them if the flaw couldn’t be exploited by a malicious actor.

Prioritizing issues is becoming an increasingly critical component of the DevSecOps pipeline to support informed decision-making, enhance security posture, and make the best use of resources.

Prioritization also streamlines compliance with security regulations, preventing legal and financial repercussions while reinforcing commitment to stringent security standards. Overall, the process optimizes resource use, strengthens defenses, and upholds the organization’s reputation by ensuring business continuity and safeguarding sensitive data and systems.

In particular, Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) has risen as a critical component of the DevSecOps stack to aggregate and prioritize hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities generated by Application Security Testing (AST) tools.

>>Learn about the seven components of ASPM 

How Vulnerabilities Were Prioritized in the Past

Traditionally, vulnerability prioritization relied heavily on tools that used predefined metrics to assess and rank vulnerabilities. Systems like the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) provided a numerical score based on factors such as the complexity of the attack, required privileges, potential impacts, exploitability and more.

Why Past Approaches to Vulnerability Prioritization Fall Short

These outdated systems often lacked the context of the organization’s specific environment, leading to a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t take runtime context into account. 

Runtime context is needed to understand how a security issue is situated within the application environment, such as which services are impacted by an issue, or what kind of access an issue may grant an attacker. Without runtime context, traditional security scoring frameworks may produce a misleading picture of your security posture.

For example, an issue with a medium CVSS score that is reachable in production can introduce far more risk than a critical CVSS issue in a service not accessible by the internet. Prioritizing the critical issue over the medium issue would lead to a false sense of security, and greater exposure to meaningful attacks. 

Simply put, traditional approaches such as CVSS are just a way to quantify the potential risk of a vulnerability, but without any context to determine its true impact. As you can imagine, prioritizing vulnerabilities without runtime context can potentially lead to misallocated resources, with teams focusing on mitigating lower-risk issues deemed critical by generic standards but benign in their specific operational context. 

Key Considerations to Effectively Prioritize Vulnerabilities



Is It Exposed to Production Environments?

Obviously, vulnerabilities within production environments are particularly critical as they pose immediate and direct risk to sensitive systems and data. 

If you have a backlog of 100 security issues, the first question you probably have is which are actually impacting services and data in production. Automatically prioritizing production security issues can save considerable time, which would otherwise require manually tracing specific repos to production services.

What Is Its Reachability?

This assessment aims to evaluate whether a vulnerability is practically reachable by attackers by considering the layers of security controls, network segmentation, and other defensive mechanisms. If an exploit exists without a logical path to it, the vulnerability might never run and wouldn't be as high a priority as more reachable alternatives. For example, if a 3rd party package exposes a vulnerable function with a known high severity vulnerability, the vulnerability is not reachable if the function is never called. 

Understanding the reachability helps focus remediation efforts on vulnerabilities that are most accessible to threats, thereby using security resources more efficiently and effectively.

Is There an Exploit?

The availability of an active exploit in the wild significantly escalates the risk associated with a vulnerability. When an exploit is readily available, attackers can easily leverage it to compromise systems, making immediate remediation critical.

This is especially true for known vulnerabilities in open source components. If there is an available exploit for a vulnerability in a commonly used open source component, attackers will test that exploit against different systems until they can leverage it for malicious intent.

Vulnerabilities with known exploits are among the top risks for any application – being able to automatically prioritize them is essential to mitigate the easiest paths to exploitation.

Is the issue exposed to the internet?

Most cyber attackers live in remote locations and attempt to gain access to systems via the internet. For this reason, vulnerabilities whose attack paths are entirely exposed to the internet are obviously more easily exploited than those that are not.

Unfortunately, determining which vulnerabilities are exposed to the internet requires tracing specific repos to production services, and determining whether those production services are connected to the internet. Efficient prioritization requires an automated approach.

How Does It Impact Data Sensitivity?

Evaluating the sensitivity of the data affected by a vulnerability is crucial for addressing security efforts. Exploits that compromise systems containing sensitive, confidential, or regulated lead to significant consequences and thus the vulnerabilities themselves should be addressed with a higher priority.

Again, most security testing and vulnerability management tools do not have an automated way to determine which issues could provide access to highly sensitive information. This usually requires manual intervention.

Can It Affect Privilege Requirements?

Vulnerabilities that allow attackers to escalate their privileges to administrative levels pose a severe risk as they could lead to broader system access and more extensive damage. 

Addressing Challenges in Modern Vulnerability Management

Complex IT Architectures

Modern IT environments are marked by complexity, including a mixture of cloud services, on-premises infrastructure, and hybrid systems. This diversity complicates effectively monitoring and prioritizing vulnerabilities across different platforms based on the factors described above.

For example, when multiple systems run on different infrastructure with varying architectures, prioritization factors like reachability and internet exposure will vary from system to system.

This is especially challenging when different vulnerabilities are tracked in different systems, making it difficult for security teams to ensure comprehensive coverage and effectively prioritize risks across such dispersed and heterogeneous environments.

Rapid Evolution of Threats

The current cybersecurity realm is characterized by a rapid emergence and evolution of new threats, making it increasingly difficult for traditional vulnerability management practices to keep pace. Many organizations find themselves in a reactive rather than a proactive posture, trying to manually update their defenses against continuously changing circumstances. 

For example, when new exploits are published, how can security teams stay notified so they know to prioritize issues that could be impacted by that exploit?

Automation is needed to effectively stay on top of ever-changing threats

Overwhelming Volume of Vulnerabilities

Automated security testing tools are critical for surfacing code flaws, but as mentioned earlier, they can generate floods of vulnerabilities that lack context of the prioritization factors described above. 

Security teams need to translate long backlogs into actionable remediation tactics, which can extend exposure windows. Without an automated approach to consider vulnerability prioritization factors, there is no way to effectively prioritize the top risks.

>>Learn about the core components of vulnerability management programs

Introducing the Context Engine: Jit’s Solution for Automated Vulnerability Prioritization

Given the complexities involved in effectively prioritizing vulnerabilities across diverse IT environments and quickly changing threat landscapes, Jit has developed the Context Engine to automate some of the prioritization factors described above.

By building a knowledge graph of a system, Context Engine can assess vulnerabilities within their runtime context, enhancing the accuracy and relevance of prioritization decisions.

How Jit’s Context Engine Assesses and Prioritizes Vulnerabilities

The Context Engine by Jit evaluates several critical factors to effectively prioritize vulnerabilities:

• Exposure to production: as mentioned, vulnerabilities in production should be prioritized over issues in other environments, as production often handles the organization's most sensitive data.

• Exposure to the internet: Context Engine is able to evaluate an attack path to determine whether an issue is accessible from the internet. 

• Fix availability: many known vulnerabilities have known fixes, while others do not. Context Engine can prioritize issues with known fixes in order to focus efforts on issues that can actually be remediated.

By integrating these critical factors, Jit’s Context Engine provides a nuanced, context-aware approach to vulnerability prioritization. As the capability develops, Context Engine will be able to consider more prioritization factors to more effectively flag the top security risks.

As a result, security teams can spend their limited time on the top product security risks in their environment to harden their security posture.

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