How Vulnerability and Exploit Intelligence
Drives Better Vulnerability Prioritization

The exploitation of vulnerabilities increased 180% over the past year, which makes the fast and effective remediation of vulnerabilities a strategic priority for security teams. But traditional vulnerability management solutions are limited in scope – incomplete in coverage, limited in the intelligence they provide on the vulnerability’s exploitability and the asset itself, and blind to issues that might impact remediation like missing patch agents. These are the datapoints – the intelligence – that security teams need to be able to prioritize their limited time and resources to remediate the riskiest vulnerabilities, and then validate that remediation actually worked.

Putting all this data at the fingertips of the security team in a single pane of glass led us to launch a strategic partnership with VulnCheck, the industry’s leading provider of next-generation exploit and vulnerability intelligence. Our asset inventory and vulnerability prioritization capabilities leverage VulnCheck for enriched context around vulnerabilities and risk exploitation. Sevco consolidates these capabilities within the Sevco Exposure Management dashboard so automated prioritization can be realized effectively and efficiently and outputs can be integrated with a wide array of third party solutions such as CMDBs, ticketing systems, SIEMs, and SOARs.

Unique Visibility into Environmental Vulnerabilities

Legacy vulnerability management solutions only provide insights into software vulnerabilities, but risks to the environment encompass more than just CVEs: there are missing or misconfigured agents that aren’t protecting the devices they’re supposed to, shadow IT that security teams don’t have control over, end-of-life systems in need of updates. By combining these environmental vulnerabilities into a single platform that also surfaces software like CVEs, Sevco gives security teams more data about the state of their IT environment than any other tool – and any vulnerability prioritization platform that focuses exclusively on CVEs.

Sevco’s platform detects and addresses environmental vulnerabilities that other systems might overlook, such as gaps in patch management that prevent effective vulnerability remediation or mitigating controls like EDR agents that might reduce some risk. This visibility into environmental vulnerabilities depends on two capabilities that only Sevco provides:

• Comprehensive Asset Inventory (Presence): At the core of Sevco’s platform is the industry’s most accurate inventory of devices, users, software, vulnerabilities, and controls, providing detailed visibility into every asset on the enterprise network and the security tools protecting them. This comprehensive overview is crucial for identifying missing tools like patch management, which are essential for closing security gaps.
  
  
• Asset Attributes (State): Beyond just providing the presence of assets, Sevco’s platform provides deep intelligence on the state of assets and their various attributes, aggregated from every tool that Sevco is integrated with. Sevco updates these attributes in near-real time, providing you with latest data on the state of the asset, the health of the tools and agents protecting it, and the users and software associated with it.

Business Impact and Asset Criticality

Understanding the business impact of each vulnerability is key to prioritizing remediation efforts effectively. Sevco’s platform leverages deep asset intelligence to evaluate the criticality of assets and the potential business consequences of their exposure.

• Asset Criticality: Each asset is evaluated not just on its technical specifications but also on its importance to business operations. This helps in prioritizing vulnerabilities that affect critical infrastructure or high-value assets.
  
  
• Business Context: Sevco can also provide virtually limitless ability to query on business context – which users have interacted with which assets, which versions of software are running on the assets (and whether they’re end-of-life), whether a domain admin has recently logged in, etc., etc. – intelligence that enables you to assess the risks these assets could pose if breached or bricked based on what they do and who has access to them.

This intelligence is all unique to your organization and provides you with half of the risk assessment equation.

Transforming Vulnerability Prioritization with VulnCheck

With our new strategic partnership with VulnCheck and the integration of VulnCheck’s vulnerability intelligence into Sevco’s platform, we’re providing our customers with the other half of the risk assessment equation: the intelligence you need to understand the risk, technical severity, and exploitability of the vulnerabilities Sevco is consolidating and prioritizing from across your environment. Here’s how this enriched intelligence elevates vulnerability prioritization:

• Data-Driven Insight into Vulnerability and Exploit Risks: VulnCheck provides an exhaustive and timely collection of vulnerability and exploit data that enriches the vulnerabilities surfaced in the Sevco platform. This vast dataset includes detailed exploit intelligence like EPSS scores, known exploits, exploit maturity and type classifications, and real-time  evidence of exploit usage. This intelligence allows Sevco customers to prioritize vulnerabilities based on current exploitation trends and the actual threat posed.
  
  
• Improved Prioritization Efficiency: The enriched data from VulnCheck enables our customers to leverage queries in the platform to filter and sort by nearly any attribute on the exploit or the asset, enabling security teams to quickly identify high-risk vulnerabilities, allocate resources more effectively, and drive faster and more efficient remediation.

Incorporating VulnCheck’s detailed enrichment can transform vulnerability prioritization by putting all of the relevant data at your fingertips: Sevco is a single platform for security teams to see both exhaustive exploit intelligence on the vulnerabilities detected and comprehensive intelligence on the assets affected – their criticality to operations, the users who access them, the other controls present to protect them.

When the number of reported vulnerabilities continues to rise while security team capacity remains largely the same, organizations need best-in-class intelligence on vulnerabilities and their assets to prioritize the riskiest issues for remediation. Now Sevco provides deep intelligence and enrichment in both of those areas to make security teams more effective at protecting their organizations.

Schedule a demo to see how Sevco can prioritize vulnerabilities (including CVEs and environmental vulnerabilities like missing or misconfigured controls) and automate and validate remediation—all from a single dashboard.