by Carole Fennelly
May 31, 2022
Identifying both the current vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities that have been mitigated provides IT managers an accurate picture of the health of their organization's network. Tenable.io uses the “Vulnerability State” attribute to identify vulnerabilities at various stages, such as new vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities that have been fixed. This report tracks the vulnerabilities as they are fixed, and provides summary information of outstanding vulnerabilities.
The “Vulnerability State” attribute has four settings: New, Active, Fixed, and Resurfaced. When a vulnerability is first discovered on a system, the vulnerability's state is set to New. In subsequent scans, the state is changed to Active. The Fixed state is key to understanding and reporting on risk mitigations. For a vulnerability to be marked as Fixed, the vulnerability must have been once present on an asset, but is now no longer found. If a vulnerability returns after being marked as Fixed, the state is changed to Resurfaced.
Security analysts can use this content to monitor fixed vulnerabilities in several different contexts. Security analysts can view, based on severity, which vulnerabilities have been fixed. Fixed vulnerabilities can also be viewed using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln-metrics/cvss base score. Note that the severity of a vulnerability can be changed within an organization through recasting; however, the CVSS score of the vulnerability will remain unchanged. If any vulnerabilities are recast, the numbers between CVSS and Severity may not be the same. Managers can also view fixed and outstanding vulnerabilities by operating system and by Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) https://cve.mitre.org/ identifier.
Security leaders need to SEE everything, PREDICT what matters most and ACT to address cyber risk and effectively align cybersecurity initiatives with business objectives. Tenable.io discovers and analyzes assets continuously to provide an accurate and unified view of an organization’s security posture.
Chapters
Executive Summary: The Vulnerabilities Overview widgets assist in tracking vulnerability mitigations by severity, CVSS Score, CVE, and operating system. The Mitigated column displays the total number of mitigated vulnerabilities. The Unmitigated column displays the total number of vulnerabilities that have not yet been mitigated. The Exploitable column displays the percentage of those unmitigated vulnerabilities that are known to be exploitable. The Patch Available column displays the percentage of the unmitigated, exploitable vulnerabilities that have had a patch available for more than 30 days. The Exploitable Assets column displays the number of assets on the network that have unmitigated, exploitable vulnerabilities.
Top Exploitable Vulnerabilities: This chapter has two sections: Critical Exploitable Vulnerabilities, and Critical Exploitable Vulnerabilities with Patches Available Over 30 Days. The Critical Exploitable Vulnerabilities section provides details on the top critical exploitable vulnerabilities detected on the network. These vulnerabilities are dangerous because they are critical severity and are known to be exploitable. The Critical Exploitable Vulnerabilities with Patches Available Over 30 Days section provides more detail on the top critical exploitable vulnerabilities detected on the network. The vulnerabilities noted in this section have already had a patch available for more than 30 days. Tenable recommends prioritizing remediating of these vulnerabilities.
Mitigation Overview by Operating System: This chapter provides tables of the top 100 fixed vulnerabilities by operating system and other groupings. Vulnerability detection is accomplished using plugins that are grouped together into plugin families, many of which reflect different operating systems. These plugin families enable viewing the vulnerability data grouped by Windows, Linux, or other operating system or type of device.