Federal Government Information Technology

How the New Science of Vulnerability Management Can Help Struggling Federal Networks

Nextgov: Computers and networking aren’t getting any simpler. Every time a new application, technology, client, server, cloud, device or almost anything else is added to a network, the number of potential vulnerabilities that an adversary could use to successfully attack it grows. And most of the time, each additional item added brings with it multiple vulnerabilities, so the attack footprint grows much faster than the network. Even older devices and programs can hide previously unknown vulnerabilities, which means no part of a network is truly safe ground in terms of cybersecurity.

When networks were smaller, IT teams simply tried to find and fix vulnerabilities as soon as possible, generally performing that task chronologically as problems were discovered. This gave rise to vulnerability and penetration testing to unmask as many vulnerabilities as possible with the goal of enabling the fixing of problems before an attacker could exploit them. The problem today—especially in federal IT where manpower shortages are a big issue—is not finding the vulnerabilities, it’s figuring out when to fix them all.

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