Remediation – Simplify the Fixes

You are managing vulnerabilities in your corporate environment. You identified your scope, have completed penetration testing, and have received your test results.

But now, you have to take action to fix those vulnerabilities to address the risks.

Organizations must remediate prioritized vulnerabilities. Remediation processes must be well defined, including applying patches, updating configurations, and other actions to reduce potential impact. True remediation includes mitigating the vulnerability, then validating remediation activities have been successful – fixing, then making sure your fix worked as intended.

So, what is the most effective tool to support efficient remediation?

The answer is ultimately “information.”

Evolve Security enables this process by including information about remediation steps as part of an offensive security engagement. The engagement report PDF always includes recommended remediation steps with the identified vulnerabilities. But, for particularly interesting or important vulnerabilities, the Evolve Offensive Security Services team can drop real-time vulnerability details into the Darwin Attack feed.  This provides the organizations with actionable information while testing is still ongoing, without having to wait for the full report to be finished.

The Evolve Security team also includes the itemized list of identified vulnerabilities in the Darwin Attack platform, along with discrete remediation recommendations for each vulnerability. The organization can use the portal to not only review the vulnerabilities, but the recommended remediations for each one, with the severity of the associated vulnerabilities, as well as the criticality of affected systems. Better yet, this data is available while the test is ongoing, providing the organization with valuable real-time information.

Darwin Attack also helps you manage your vulnerabilities by including explicit steps to record vulnerabilities, for the organization to confirm them, and accept risk, or label them as “remediated.”  Along with each vulnerability tracked in the Darwin Attack portal, that vulnerability includes the exact disposition of that vulnerability – so at a glance, the organization can tell the exact status of that vulnerability. Has it been validated? Has it been deemed impractical to fix, or not worth the effort and marked as “accepted risk?”  If remediation testing has been included in the contract, Evolve can additionally schedule remediated vulnerabilities to be retested and closed as “verified fixed,” indicating that Evolve Security engineers have verified that remediation has been successfully completed.

More effective collaboration and communications, designed to improve the quality of information can improve the organization’s ability to remediate vulnerabilities in an efficient manner. And efficient remediation can directly reduce organizational risk.