Organizations will be quickly overwhelmed if they try to treat all vulnerabilities equally. Given the sheer volume of vulnerabilities, limited resources, and varying objectives across the teams involved, effective cybersecurity requires the ability to view vulnerabilities in the proper context and prioritize them accordingly for treatment — whether to remediate or mitigate or accept the risk.
Redefining “Vulnerability”
For starters, organizations must establish what it means to say they have a vulnerability. Vulnerabilities are often defined and interpreted in a silo or vacuum that fails to consider other relevant factors such as availability of exploits, threat actors, motivation, etc. Thus, the reality is that a vulnerability is only as bad as the threat exploiting it and the potential impact that a successful exploit could have on an organization or business.
