1. Identifying Vulnerabilities
The goal of this stage is to create a complete list of vulnerabilities in an application. Security analysts scan applications, servers, and other systems with automated tools or manually test and evaluate them to determine their security health. Vulnerability databases, vendor vulnerability notifications, asset management systems, and threat intelligence feeds are also used by analysts to identify security flaws.
2. Vulnerability Appraisal
The goal of this stage is to determine the source and root cause of the vulnerabilities discovered in the previous step.
It entails determining which system components are responsible for each vulnerability, as well as the vulnerability’s fundamental cause. An obsolete version of an open source library, for example, could be the source of a vulnerability. This creates a clear path for remediation – library upgrades.
3. Risk Evaluation
The goal of this phase is to rank vulnerabilities in order of importance. It entails security experts awarding each vulnerability a rank or severity score based on parameters such as:
- What systems are affected by this?
- What information is at risk?
- What business functions are under jeopardy?
- Attack or compromise ease
- The degree to which an attack is severe.
- As a result of the susceptibility, there is the possibility of damage.
4. Clean-up
The goal of this step is to eliminate security flaws. It’s usually a collaborative endeavour between security, development, and operations teams to establish the most effective method for each vulnerability’s remedy or mitigation.
The following are examples of possible remedial steps:
- New security procedures, measures, or techniques are implemented.
- Address operational or configuration modifications that need to be updated.
- Creation and deployment of a vulnerability patch.