Why You Must Prioritize IT Vulnerability Risks

Why You Must Prioritize IT Vulnerability Risks – A common sense explanation.

  • Why should you prioritize the risks in your IT network?

  • Why can’t you just fix ALL the problems?

Unless you work in a company that has unlimited resources and you have absolute support at all levels for remediating the vulnerabilities in your environment, you MUST prioritize the issues that cause the most risk to your IT environment.

 

Analogy.. “The To-Do List”

Say your wife gives you a list of 150 things to get done on a Saturday afternoon.. How many can you realistically get done? Maybe 5? Maybe 10 if the tasks are small.

If you have a large network, you likely have many possible vulnerabilities. Say you have a relatively small list of 300 security issues found from vulnerability scans and other security assessments and tests.. Can you realistically expect all the teams that would own fixing those issues to drop everything they are doing and fix the “list” of issues you give them?

How much security remediation work can you really expect to accomplish? The answer for these types of questions is more dependent on how your organization functions than on any calculations or math.  Every IT shop is trying to fight for resources to..

1) Implement customer projects.

2) Upgrade and/or modernize their own infrastructure.

3) Implement their own strategic initiatives.

4) Have a work/life balance.

 

Where does that leave working on tasks to fix issues that have been found through security testing?

The naive answer is to say that security should always be a top priority and the teams should figure out a way to get the work done. For those that work in the real world it simply is not that easy.

Resources such as budget, hardware, and time is limited. Some IT shops are fighting to survive. If they have to stop business driven projects for 3 months to fix security issues their business customers may choose to use other options.

What is the answer?

The answer is to use Risk Analysis and Risk Management techniques to determine what the highest risk vulnerabilities are to your IT environment. This is called using a “Risk Based Approach.”  Simply put, it means to fix the most risky things first. You would think this is common sense, but you would be wrong. There is often a reflexive response to any type of possible security issue. The reflex response is “just fix it”. If there are 5 issues, then just fix them. If there are 200 issues, then just fix them.

The problem is that most decent sized companies will have many possible issues. You simply can not have a completely secure environment without making the environment unusable.  I go back to the example of having a list of 150 tasks to complete in one day. It simply isn’t possible. However, could you get 5 done? Probably so. Could you get a small amount done on 20 tasks? Probably so.

So which one is better? Getting 5 security issues completely resolved or 20 issues partially completed in a year? That needs to be a management decision based on good risk analysis of the issues.

Fixing security issues is an effort like any other.

The whole point of this post is to get you to understand that resolving security issues is no different from any other project or effort. No company or organization can implement every good idea. They must prioritize in order to get the best results from their efforts.

Resolving security issues is a work effort just like any other in an IT organization. The effort must be prioritized against all other efforts so that they can get the proper focus and funding. If you don’t have focus on a few things, then you get very little accomplished, and your efforts are spread thin.

Final Analogy… Pruning…

Every organization is like a rose bush or a grape vine. In order for nutrients to allow the main stems and fruit to truly mature and reach its full potential, you must prune the small branches and vines that use up the resources of the plant that don’t add any fruit or flowers. The small branches use energy and resources, and eventually will cause the plant to be poor producer of fruit or flowers. Why? Because no focus was devoted to the things that mattered.

Final Point : To get things done, you must prioritize and be able to focus your energy and effort on what matters most.

NorthWest Arkansas ISSA Presentation

I’m giving a high level presentation over the PCI-DSS requirements around Vulnerability Management and Penetration testing for our April 5 ISSA meeting.

Most of the details will be in Q&A and discussion. So don’t expect a lot of deep content in the powerpoint slides linked below.

PCI_Vuln_Pen_ISSA_March_2011_ppt

The meetings are typically held on the first Tuesdays of each month at Whole Hog Cafe. A great Memphis style barbecue restaurant in Bentonville Arkansas.