An accidental or unintended flaw in any system or software code that makes it exploitable in terms of access to illegal users or malicious behaviors such as worms, trojans, viruses or any other malware is known as a security vulnerability. The use of software that has already been exploited or the use of default or weak passwords may also lead to making the system vulnerable.  

Recent data breaches show that there is no system immune to cyber attacks. Any company that manages, stores, transmits, or handles data has to institute and enforce tools to monitor their cyber environment, identify security vulnerabilities, and close security holes immediately. Before identifying certain dangers to data systems, it’s essential to know the difference between cyber threats and vulnerabilities. 

Similar to how software bugs are triaged for a severity level, so too are security vulnerabilities as they need to be assessed for impact and risk, which aids in vulnerability management. The forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) is an international organization of trusted security scientists and computer researchers that have received the task of creating best practices and tools for incident responses teams, as well as standardizing security methodologies and policies.
One of FIRST’s initiatives is the Special Interest Group (SIG) that is responsible for developing and maintaining the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) specification to assist the security team to understand and prioritize the severity of a security vulnerability. 

With the massive shift to remote work due to COVID-19 – with upwards of 42% of US employees now working remotely according to Stanford professor William D. Eberle – there’s been an uptick in security breaches. It seems reasonable to expect this trend to continue as working from home is normalized and more employees use personal devices to access the infrastructure necessary to perform their duties.

Here’s a quick rundown of the largest data security breaches from last year:

What is a zero-day vulnerability?

A zero-day (or 0-day) vulnerability is a software vulnerability that hasn’t been publicly disclosed or was recently discovered due to a successful attack. Once the threat is discovered, the race is on to patch the vulnerability before it can be exploited. In other words, the software developers have zero days to fix the vulnerability.

CVE and CVSS are some of the most commonly misunderstood features of patching. In this article, we will explore the differences and showcase how they can affect your patching technique. Although many IT managers are familiar with these terms CVE and CVSS, some IT professionals still don’t understand the difference between them. CVE and CVSS are synonymous with software vulnerabilities, patching and operating systems. 

“Patch Tuesday” is a term widely used between IT and security teams to describe the time when Microsoft releases the latest updates. The ones who participate in it know the true cost of the patching cycle, whether it’s getting the approval, designing the plan, or dealing with the outcome.

Prognosis: Vulnerability Proliferation

With the increase of software usage worldwide, it’s only natural that a growing number of vulnerabilities will be discovered.

1999 was the inflection point for vulnerability listings. Prior to that, a variety of security tools offered different ways to categorize software security issues. As there was no standardized protocol for listing a vulnerability, inconsistencies were inevitable. In that year, the concept of common vulnerability and exposure (CVE) was introduced as a standard to represent software security flaws.