Greater than 40,000 new vulnerabilities (CVEs) have been printed in 2024 alone. Greater than 60% of these have been labeled “excessive” or “crucial.” Sounds scary, certain, however what number of of them really put your setting in danger?
Not practically as many as you would possibly assume.
Scoring programs like CVSS flag severity based mostly on technical components. However they don’t know your community, your controls, or the way you’ve hardened key belongings. That’s an issue. As a result of with out context, groups spend an excessive amount of time chasing scary-looking bugs which will already be blocked, and miss the quiet ones that aren’t.
This submit breaks down why conventional vulnerability prioritization typically leads you astray, and the way a greater method, publicity validation, helps groups deal with what’s really exploitable.
What’s the Downside With “Crucial” Vulnerabilities?
Let’s begin with the numbers. Vulnerability disclosures jumped 38% final 12 months. And plenty of instruments, scanners, patching platforms, and dashboards nonetheless type them by uncooked CVSS or EPSS scores.
However right here’s the factor: these are simply international scores. Which means, as a result of a vulnerability scores a 9.8 on paper, it doesn’t imply it has a crucial influence on your setting. Your firewall, EDR, IPS/IDS, or segmentation would possibly already cease the exploit chilly. In the meantime, that “medium” severity situation buried decrease on the record? It might really be a ticking time bomb.
There’s additionally the velocity of weaponization. In early 2024, greater than half of exploited vulnerabilities have been was working exploits shortly after public disclosure. Attackers transfer quick, typically sooner than defenders can react. And whereas new vulnerabilities seize headlines, many breaches nonetheless come all the way down to older flaws we already find out about however haven’t patched in time.
What we’ve right here isn’t a discovery drawback, it’s a prioritization drawback.
Why Conventional Scoring Falls Brief
Let’s break down how the same old programs work.
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(The) CVSS provides you a severity ranking based mostly on entry necessities, privileges, and potential influence.
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EPSS predicts the chance of exploitation utilizing exterior risk alerts.
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CISA KEV flags identified exploited vulnerabilities.
Useful? Positive, in big-picture phrases, sure. However as useful as they’re, in idea, these programs don’t know your particular setting.
They’ll’t inform in case your IPS blocks the exploit, if the asset is remoted, or if the system even issues. In order that they deal with all networks the identical, which might simply result in losing time and assets on the mistaken fixes on account of a way of false urgency.
Exchange guesswork with proof.
See how Picus validates your dangers towards actual assaults and focuses your efforts on exposures you really want to repair.
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What Is Publicity Validation?
Publicity Validation flips the method. As a substitute of guessing how dangerous a vulnerability could be, it checks whether or not it’s really exploitable in your precise setting.
It’s like working protected, managed assault simulations, utilizing real-world adversarial strategies, to see if your entire kill chain of the exploitation marketing campaign works on you. In case your controls cease it, nice. If not, now you already know what to repair.
The purpose is straightforward: change assumptions with proof. This manner, you possibly can repair the vulnerabilities that matter essentially the most, first.
The Tech Behind It: BAS + Automated Pentests
Publicity Validation depends on two varieties of protected, non-destructive instruments.
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Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS): BAS runs steady assault situations utilizing identified ways and malware behaviors documented within the wild. Consider them as a technique to test whether or not your EDR, SIEM, and firewall are catching what they’re purported to, towards each identified and rising threats.
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Automated Penetration Testing: This method mimics the actions of an attacker who already has entry to your setting, testing how far they may go, as soon as they’re inside. This consists of lateral motion, privilege escalation, credential entry, and makes an attempt to achieve delicate targets like area admins. It additionally frees up your pink staff to deal with extra complicated, artistic, or crucial assault paths.
Working collectively, these instruments assist your groups perceive what attackers might actually do in your community, not simply what could be theoretically potential.
When a CVSS Rating of 9.4 Isn’t Crucial
Let’s see how this works in apply. Say a scanner flags a vulnerability with a CVSS rating of 9.4. That sounds severe. However publicity validation places it to the check.
First step: Is there a public exploit?
Sure. There’s a proof of idea accessible. However it’s not plug-and-play. It takes technical ability and a few particular circumstances to succeed. That makes this vulnerability much less crucial than it first seems, and the danger is adjusted to replicate that. This by itself drops the rating to eight.7.
Subsequent: Can your defenses cease it?
Now it’s time to test your security stack: cloud controls, community protections, endpoint instruments, and SIEM guidelines. If these are already detecting or blocking the assault, the danger drops considerably.
On this case, your breach and assault simulation resolution exhibits that your present controls are doing their job, bringing the vuln’s rating down to six.0.
Final test: Does the system matter?
The susceptible asset is just not crucial. It doesn’t maintain delicate information and doesn’t influence core operations. With that in thoughts, the rating drops once more, this time to 2.4.
On this situation, the scanner all however screamed it had a vulnerability with a 9.4 rating and it was crucial that you simply pay it some severe consideration. Nevertheless, in your real-world setting, this vuln could be blocked and detected, letting you take care of way more crucial vulnerabilities to your org. That is what publicity validation does. It differentiates the actual dangers from the noise, letting you repair what issues and transfer on from what doesn’t.
A Smarter Solution to Prioritize
Picus Safety’s Publicity Validation (EXV) resolution helps groups transfer previous surface-level scores and deal with what’s actual.
We mix assault floor administration, breach and assault simulation, and automatic pentesting collectively to see whether or not a vulnerability may be exploited in your precise setting.
Then it calculates a threat rating that displays actual circumstances, not simply worst-case assumptions. That rating takes into consideration three key components:
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Is the vulnerability really exploitable?
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Are your present controls already blocking it?
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Does the affected system really matter to your group and its every day operations?
Armed with this context, your groups now not need to chase down each high-severity alert. You get a transparent, manageable record of exposures confirmed to matter to your small business and its setting with far much less noise.
Outcomes From the Area
When groups cease counting on uncooked CVSS scores and begin validating exposures, they begin seeing outcomes instantly.
As Picus, we’ve seen organizations minimize their crucial vulnerability depend by greater than half, from 63 p.c to simply 10 p.c. Identical setting. Identical instruments. The one change was verifying what might really be exploited.
That shift saves hours of patching, clears out the noise, and most significantly, lets security groups extra successfully deal with actual threats and successfully cease chasing ghosts.
As a substitute of flooding workflows with lots of of high-severity findings, groups get a clear, centered record of what really issues. Much less time spent arguing over priorities. Extra time fixing actual points.
Validation turns vulnerability administration into one thing actionable. You progress sooner, waste much less, and shield what actually issues.
Closing Ideas
You don’t want to repair all the things. You simply want to repair what’s actual.
Publicity validation helps groups transfer previous uncooked severity scores and begin making selections based mostly on information.
The consequence? Higher prioritization, stronger defenses, and a safer group.
Study extra about Picus Safety’s Publicity Validation (EXV) resolution.
Sponsored and written by Picus Safety.