Automating Vulnerability Management from Scratch

OVERVIEW

Did you know that an average of 14,600 vulnerabilities are disclosed each year? How are you handling your discovered vulnerabilities? Vulnerability management is a difficult task, especially at a large organization. In fact, it takes an average of 100 days until known security vulnerabilities are remediated. Often times vulnerability management is implemented in segments, without a big picture vision. It can be also arduous and cumbersome, costing employees valuable time and effort. However, vulnerability management is a necessity in today’s cyber security landscape.

In this talk, we discuss where vulnerability management programs fall short and how we can avoid such pitfalls. We will walk through a typical program and the pain points. Once we understand the problem, we will enhance the process through automating asset inventory and daily vulnerability collection. We will also demonstrate how using automation to search asset inventory for newly discovered vulnerabilities increases speed and efficiency of the team and helps to more quickly create action items from discovered vulnerabilities. In addition, our process will help teams determine which vulnerabilities are the riskiest and organize them by remediation priority.

The vulnerability management program is built from the ground up across a complex work environment using Python3, Jenkins, SQL, and a few extra tips and tricks. Proof-of-concept code will be open sourced at the conclusion of the discussion and attendees will leave this talk with the ability to implement similar automated vulnerability management solutions in their environments.