As touched on in part one of this series, we’ve relied on vulnerability scanners to assess our assets and generate reports containing IP addresses and their associated CVEs. CVEs add value but only represent a subset of your risk exposure. They completely miss critical variables such as the presence and state of endpoint IT management and security controls, making them largely obsolete when relied upon in a vacuum.
With an asset management solution like Sevco, you can make API connections to virtually any asset intelligence source. In near real-time, you can integrate with IT management and security tool management consoles, network and cloud management, identity management, application management, IoT management, etc. And yes, you can also integrate with vulnerability scanners.
This source information is collected, normalized, deduplicated, and correlated. Interestingly, most modern IT and security management solutions offering endpoint agents collect CVE data from the host’s operating systems and applications. The CVE data gleaned in Sevco through these integrations is on par and, in many cases, more robust than the CVE data from vulnerability scanners because it operates on the asset itself.
Because of the richness of the CVE data derived from IT and security management tools installed on endpoints, the additional information derived from the vulnerability scanners becomes largely redundant. It’s not that vulnerability scanners don’t provide good data; it’s just that a great deal of that data can come from many other sources you may already have deployed.
Beyond the data sources and quality, you must also consider that running vulnerability scanners can be risky to certain assets and onerous when attempting to extract value. Further, they also lack insight into the presence and state of your IT and security management solutions installed on those assets, thus making risk prioritization questionable.
So, are vulnerability scanners dead? While many organizations would say yes, it depends on your environment, the IT and security management solutions you’ve installed, and your implementation of a well-instrumented asset management platform like Sevco.
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