What Is Vulnerability Prioritization? Importance & Best Practices

What is vulnerability prioritization?

Vulnerability prioritization is the practice of determining which cybersecurity vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk to an organization. Typically, teams make decisions about which vulnerabilities to prioritize by assessing how much risk each vulnerability poses to their organization.

The ability to prioritize vulnerabilities is important because, again, the number of active vulnerabilities an organization faces is typically quite large. In addition, it’s common to discover new vulnerabilities on a regular basis. Vulnerabilities like the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) register an average of about 76 new vulnerabilities per day, and each one could lead to new alerts about risks that an organization didn’t previously know existed.

The high volume of vulnerabilities, combined with the fact that new vulnerabilities emerge constantly, makes it critical for organizations to be able to decide which ones to prioritize. If a business were instead to address priorities in the order they are discovered, it would likely leave critical vulnerabilities unaddressed while engineers spend time mitigating issues that don’t actually pose a major threat.

In this article:

• What is vulnerability prioritization?
• Key elements of vulnerability prioritization
• How to prioritize vulnerabilities
• A comprehensive approach to vulnerability prioritization and management with Aqua

How to prioritize vulnerabilities

There are multiple methods available for assessing and prioritizing vulnerabilities. Most organizations use one or more of the following approaches:

• Manual assessment: Manual techniques for prioritizing vulnerabilities include creating a risk matrix that summarizes vulnerability risk level based on severity, exploitability, asset criticality, and ease of remediation. From there, teams can decide which vulnerabilities to fix first.
• Automated prioritization: Advanced vulnerability remediation tools can automatically provide guidance about which vulnerabilities to prioritize based on factors like vulnerability severity ratings and exploitability within a particular software environment.
• Advanced assessment: Taking automation a step further, some teams use AI-guided vulnerability assessment and threat intelligence reporting to augment the prioritization recommendations provided by vulnerability scanning tools.
• Continuous monitoring and reassessment: Because new vulnerabilities arise constantly – and because changes in an organization’s software assets and configurations can impact vulnerability risks – continuously scanning for and reassessing vulnerabilities is critical. You can do this by integrating vulnerability scanning into your SSDLC.

Note that some of these practices overlap, and that it’s possible to employ multiple methods at the same time. A team might rely on vulnerability scanning reports to make a short list of vulnerabilities to prioritize, for example, then dig deeper via manual analysis to rank vulnerabilities within the list and decide which ones to address first.

Key elements of vulnerability prioritization

To decide which vulnerabilities to prioritize, teams must determine the overall risk of vulnerabilities based on the following five criteria.

#1. Vulnerability severity

Some vulnerabilities are inherently more severe than others. For example, vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit remotely over the network are typically more dangerous than those that require physical access, since network-based attacks are easier to carry out.

In general, organizations should prioritize high-severity vulnerabilities because they can cause the most harm. 

#2. Exploitability

Vulnerability exploitability refers to the conditions or configurations that need to be present within a software environment for threat actors to take advantage of a vulnerability. In some cases, a vulnerability may exist – meaning vulnerable code is present in an application – but not be exploitable due to configuration settings. A vulnerable application service could be running on a different port than the one required to exploit the vulnerability, for example, or an access control may be in place that prevents attackers from being able to connect to a vulnerable application.

By assessing exploitability, organizations can make informed decisions about whether they need to prioritize a given vulnerability. It’s sometimes the case that high-severity vulnerabilities are not high-priority because they’re not actually exploitable under a particular configuration.

#3. Asset criticality

Vulnerabilities that impact critical applications or services typically take priority over those that affect less important resources. For instance, if a vulnerability only impacts an application that is running in a dev/test environment, an organization would typically consider it to be less of a priority than one that affects a production application.

#4. Ease of remediation

The time and expertise required to remediate a vulnerability may impact prioritization decisions. If your goal is to resolve as many serious vulnerabilities as possible in as little time as possible, it makes sense to prioritize vulnerabilities that you can mitigate quickly. This means that if a patch for a vulnerability is available and readily installable, for example, an organization would typically prioritize fixing that vulnerability over one that requires developers to create a new patch from scratch, a process that would take longer.

It’s important to address more challenging priorities, too, but focusing on ones that you can fix quickly allows you to reduce your overall risk level as rapidly as possible.

#5. Exploit code

Research shows that only about 4 percent of publicly reported security vulnerabilities have publicly available exploit code – meaning tools that threat actors can use to take advantage of vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities with exploit code are typically considered higher risk because exploiting them is easier.

Other vulnerabilities should be taken seriously, too, since threat actors could always write their own exploit code. But in general, a vulnerability that malicious parties can easily exploit using publicly available code should take precedence over one that requires custom code.

A comprehensive approach to vulnerability prioritization and management with Aqua

As a comprehensive cloud-native security platform, Aqua provides the advanced capabilities teams need not just to find vulnerabilities, but to prioritize and mitigate them efficiently. Features like the ability to filter vulnerabilities based on whether exploits exist, categorize vulnerabilities by type, and assess vulnerability exploitability, make it easy for teams to cut through the noise and focus on what matters.
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