Vulnerability mitigation means reducing the likelihood and impact of security weaknesses in systems, applications, and networks. It allows you to minimize your attack surface and strengthen your cybersecurity posture, thereby preventing compliance penalties and costly security incidents.
Vulnerability Mitigation Defined
Vulnerability mitigation involves applying an array of strategies, tactics, techniques, and security mechanisms to lower or eliminate security risks in your IT environment, from technical controls and administrative procedures to operational practices. The goal is to make it more difficult for adversaries to exploit vulnerabilities and to limit the damage when exploitation does occur.
Effective mitigation ensures that systems are resilient against known CVEs and emerging threats, meaning it’s crucial for maintaining continuous security and operational stability.
How Does Mitigation Work?
Usually, vulnerability mitigation assumes a previous systematic identification, assessment, and prioritization of security vulnerabilities within your environment.
Here’s how it typically works:
- Vulnerability Identification: This stage is all about discovering vulnerabilities through scanning, penetration testing, security audits, threat intelligence feeds, or other methods. The aim is to create an inventory of vulnerabilities that is as complete as possible.
- Vulnerability Assessment: Once identified, vulnerabilities are assessed for their severity. This step allows you to prioritize the mitigation of those vulnerabilities with the highest CVSS scores, that is, with critical and high severity, or the ones that would have the highest impact on your business if exploited.
- Mitigation Strategy Development: The previous assessment stage enables you to develop appropriate mitigation strategies. These can include virtual patching, enforcing zero-trust architecture, reconfiguring firewalls, implementing network segmentation, multifactor authentication, and similar.
- Implementation of Controls: At this phase, you implement the chosen mitigation controls. This step may involve technical changes, process adjustments, and policy updates. A key consideration here is to make sure that your mitigation measures don’t introduce new vulnerabilities or negatively impact the functionality of your systems in general.
- Monitoring and Review: After applying mitigation, your job is to monitor how effective it is in the real world. That means re-scanning for vulnerabilities, reviewing logs, and making adjustments as new threats emerge or system configurations change.
However, consider that a new approach to vulnerability mitigation and, generally, vulnerability management has occurred—a mitigation-first approach. As the name indicates, it flips the script of vulnerability and exposure management. It does this by applying technology that allows immediate mitigation as the first step in managing vulnerabilities independently of vulnerability prioritization, assessment, and even scanning.
Currently, the only complete mitigation-first security solution is embodied in Virsec’s platform, OTTOGUARD.AI.
Vulnerability Mitigation vs. Other Security Measures
Remediation, in a broad sense, means simply addressing security vulnerabilities. In that context, vulnerability mitigation is a form of remediation, and it differs from other methods of addressing security vulnerabilities and incidents:
- Vulnerability Mitigation vs. Patching: Patching is a remediation method focused on applying permanent fixes. As such, it differs from mitigation, which is generally an interim solution. However, mitigation is a much faster approach to addressing vulnerabilities, and it has a wider scope, being applicable to both CVE and zero-day vulnerabilities.
- Vulnerability Mitigation vs. Incident Response: Vulnerability mitigation aims to prevent incidents by addressing weaknesses beforehand. Incident response, on the other hand, focuses on recovering from security incidents after they have occurred. They are complementary processes, with mitigation reducing the frequency of incidents.
Examples of Vulnerability Mitigation in Use
Autonomous application control is a great example of vulnerability mitigation in action. This technology prevents adversaries from exploiting vulnerabilities by constantly monitoring, verifying, and enforcing the established trusted behavior of your applications with no human intervention.
The purpose of autonomous application control is to block suspicious activities in real time. It drastically reduces the number of exploitable gaps, leading to more secure applications from the very beginning of its deployment. It’s considered one of the best preventive measures out there.
Another example of mitigation in use is multifactor authentication (MFA). MFA lowers the risk of compromised credentials, even in cases of successful phishing attacks leading to credential theft.
Closing Gaps Before Patches Arrive
Vulnerability mitigation strives to proactively reduce the risk of exploitation by promptly addressing weaknesses across your entire IT environment. The consistent and timely implementation of mitigation enables you to lower the exposure during patching cycles and effectively counter modern threats at their speed and scale.