What is Vulnerability Management?

An effective vulnerability management strategy helps organizations promptly monitor, identify, and respond to existing and emerging threats. An effective strategy enables organizations to reduce operational disruptions by providing visibility into their threat mitigation and incident response plans. This approach to vulnerability management is crucial for safeguarding stakeholders' interests, helping to meet regulatory compliance, and instilling trust in the organization's reputation.

However, managing security vulnerabilities in the cloud requires a different approach than traditional vulnerability management methods. Modern cloud environments are more complex than conventional on-premises architecture and, thus, require a different approach to address vulnerabilities. 

Managing security starts from architecture planning and continues even after you've deployed the workloads in the cloud. Here are the steps that help you create a vulnerability management program.

1. Develop a vulnerability management plan

A vulnerability management plan outlines the goals, scope, and responsibilities for mitigating both unknown and known vulnerabilities. A vulnerability management plan helps security teams, employees, and other stakeholders to act in predictable ways when addressing vulnerabilities.

To develop a vulnerability management plan, you need to include:

• Methods for classifying vulnerabilities based on their severity
• Vulnerability management tools to use for asset monitoring, threat detection, and incident response
• Target resolution time that security teams must comply with for respective risk categories
• Reporting requirements to provide security insights, unresolved issues, and compliance status
• Governance workflow to promote accountability and responsibility across the organization

2. Implement vulnerability scanning

Vulnerability scanning helps security teams identify known and emerging security flaws in your digital assets. A vulnerability scanner analyzes applications, networks, and infrastructure for vulnerabilities that threat actors could exploit.

You can automate vulnerability scans across various digital assets, including:

• Applications
• Network configurations
• Cloud infrastructure
• Server and computer systems
• Endpoint devices

For example, in the AWS cloud, Amazon Inspector automatically scans compute instances, code repositories, container images, and other workload types for vulnerabilities. You can use Amazon Inspector, AWS Systems Manager, and AWS Security Hub to help identify and respond to publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.

3. Establish risk-based vulnerability management processes

Next, create a workflow to identify, prioritize, and remediate the identified vulnerabilities. Additionally, consider the operational environment, potential impact, and affected workload when managing vulnerabilities. This triage step is helpful because vulnerabilities have varying severities and, consequently, can impact business and operational outcomes on different scales.

To conduct risk assessments, you can use standard scoring systems, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), as a guide for evaluating risk factors. By using a standardized framework, you can allocate resources optimally while working against the target resolution timeline to mitigate the discovered risks. For example, a vulnerability in a user authentication module, despite being classified as low risk, should be escalated for immediate attention to prevent unauthorized access.

4. Set up patch management

Patch management is crucial for managing security risks across an organization's threat exposure surface. A patch management tool automatically downloads security patches and software updates from vendors and applies them to the deployed software. When automated, patch management software closes security loopholes by remediating known and potential vulnerabilities before they pose a more significant risk.

For example, on AWS, you can automate patch management with AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager. Patch Manager can apply security patches to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, edge devices, on-premise devices, and virtual machines. You can set patching policies to apply security patches according to region, approval guidelines, and a scheduled time.

Note: Consider rolling out the patches to a small number of devices before applying them organization-wide. This approach allows you to confirm the patches are stable and won’t result in an undesirable impact on operations.

5. Configure malware protection

Malicious programs, or malware, can infect devices in an unmonitored environment. To prevent malware infection, install malware protection, such as AWS GuardDuty.

Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, AWS GuardDuty allows you to analyze, detect, and escalate malware findings, including trojans, worms, crypto miners, rootkits, or bots. Additionally, you can direct all detection to AWS Security Hub to facilitate remediation efforts.

6. Integrate vulnerability scanning in CI/CD pipelines

Vulnerabilities can be introduced into an application during development through coding errors, inadequate security checks, and the use of unsafe third-party components. Left undetected, security flaws can slip through into the production environment, resulting in more costly remediation. To avoid such complications, shift security to the left by scanning code for vulnerabilities earlier in the software development lifecycle with tools such as AWS CodeGuru.

AWS CodeGuru is a static application security testing tool (SAST) that allows software teams to identify and remediate vulnerabilities more effectively. You can easily integrate CodeGuru into your CI/CD workflows to automatically detect security weaknesses using machine learning-powered automated reasoning.

7. Configure a security monitoring service

Security teams need a holistic view of the organization's infrastructure, network, and workloads to respond to threats and incidents effectively. Instead of manually conducting scans and escalating security findings, it is best practice to use a unified security monitoring service, such as AWS Security Hub, to streamline cloud security workflows.

By deploying AWS Security Hub, you help improve cloud resilience through automated checks based on standardized security frameworks. AWS Security Hub integrates with other AWS services to accelerate threat identification, containment, and response. Using AWS Security Hub, you gain an overview of immediate vulnerability management actions and can shorten the time between vulnerability detection and remediation.

8. Implement web application penetration testing

Penetration testing allows you to proactively identify security flaws and assess their impact on your organization. In a web application penetration test, cybersecurity experts perform intentional and targeted attempts to assess the existing security measures of deployed web applications. Then, they document the outcomes, prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities, and perform mitigation measures.

Note: If you're building, testing, and deploying apps on AWS, you can conduct penetration testing on permitted services to validate and improve overall web app security.

9. Automate with infrastructure as code

Securing complex cloud environments is more manageable with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) services. Manual provisioning of cloud resources increases the risk of cloud configuration errors, which can affect infrastructure security.

Instead of manually provisioning cloud infrastructure, use IaC tools, such as AWS CloudFormation, to automate compute resource allocation, service configuration, and other cloud management tasks. With CloudFormation, you can scale your AWS workloads consistently and in a controlled manner while reducing the risks of misconfiguration. 

Vulnerability management is essential for supporting an organization's efforts to innovate securely in the cloud. A comprehensive vulnerability management system helps prevent operational disruptions, financial losses, and reputational damages that arise from cyber threats. On AWS, vulnerability management begins with understanding the Shared Responsibility Model, which forms the foundation for layered security measures.

Explore more ways to improve vulnerability management with cloud security, identity, and compliance on AWS here.