Application vulnerability management best practices

Over the years, application vulnerability management has been vital to DevSecOps — which emphasizes shared security responsibility across teams. 

However, as development practices have evolved, security teams must learn how to adapt and meet developers within their existing workflows. For example, containerization, infrastructure as code (IaC) AI coding assistants, and increased reliance on third-party code are all commonplace in the typical development lifecycle. These practices didn’t exist ten years ago, meaning that security teams have had to adapt to these “new normals” over time. 

To adapt, security teams have had to strike a balance between old and new techniques. In many cases, tried-and-true techniques still hold up but must be supplemented with newer practices that can adapt to the changes in how developers build software today. 

Vulnerability management is one of those cases. While it’s been around for many years and has its place in modern security practices, teams must use other best practices to support it.

This blog post will cover the basics of application vulnerability management: what it is, its limitations, and which best practices can best support it in today’s rapidly evolving SDLCs. 

Application vulnerability management explained

Application vulnerability management is a comprehensive approach to identifying, classifying, remediating, and mitigating application vulnerabilities. The key components of vulnerability management include:

1. Identifying vulnerabilities throughout the application lifecycle.

2. Classifying and analyzing identified vulnerabilities to understand their nature, severity, and potential impact.

3. Remediating and mitigating identified vulnerabilities by applying patches, changing configurations, or implementing workaround controls.

4. Reporting and documenting all vulnerability management processes and outcomes.

5. Continuously monitoring and reviewing the organization’s applications to adapt to new threats.

To scale and improve these steps, larger organizations can also use enterprise vulnerability management techniques, including: 

• Working with enterprise management tools such as configuration management databases (CMDBs), patch management systems, and security information and event management (SIEM) systems.

• Automating key activities such as scanning, threat assessment, patch deployment, and reporting.

• Mapping activities to regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS).

• Working with advanced threat intelligence databases.

• Leveraging a centralized view of vulnerability data across the entire organization.

Two vulnerability management best practices

Teams can leverage vulnerability management to support their application security initiatives in a few ways. Here are the top two best practices for successfully leveraging vulnerability management for more effective AppSec:

Automate where possible

Given the volume and frequency of new vulnerabilities and updates, manually managing them can be overwhelming, error-prone, and impractical for any organization. Automation minimizes human error, speeds up vulnerability management processes, and frees security personnel to focus on more strategic tasks.

A few areas that are prime for automation include:

• Vulnerability scanning with a tool, like Snyk, that can perform scans at regular intervals.

• Patch management with tools like Microsoft Intune or SolarWinds Patch Manager.

• Reporting and monitoring, including sending real-time alerts to the right team members.

While automation speeds up processes and reduces the risk of human error, you still need human oversight to update the rules in your automation tools from time to time. 

Empower developers to play a part in vulnerability management.

As mentioned, DevSecOps is critical for application security success. There are a few tactics that make it easier for development teams to take part in vulnerability management, including: 

• Conducting threat modeling sessions to determine a clear direction for your security program.

• Enforcing secure coding standards and practices with policy-as-code (PaC) throughout the software development lifecycle.

• Educating developers on common security pitfalls in coding and how to fix them.

• Using tools that perform static application security testing (SAST) and software composition analysis (SCA) as soon as the developers commit their code. The sooner your tooling can flag a security issue, the easier it will be for the developer to mitigate it.

The limitations of vulnerability management

While vulnerability management plays a crucial role in application security, it still falls short in a few areas. Application vulnerability management tends to operate under a few assumptions that simply aren’t accurate anymore in today’s complex, fast-paced development environments:

Limitation #1: Traditional vulnerability management sees each vulnerability as existing in a vacuum.

Historically, vulnerability management has focused on mitigating each vulnerability separately. However, what if fixing one vulnerability causes you to alter other parts of the code, causing a domino effect of new vulnerabilities? This situation can harm, rather than help, teams as they work towards a more secure application over time. 

Typical application vulnerability management lacks full application context, meaning that fixes don’t consider the whole application and could cause more vulnerabilities over time.

Limitation #2: Traditional vulnerability management gauges risk by a standard score such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).

Generally speaking, application vulnerability management leans on standard scores such as CVSS to gauge the risk associated with each vulnerability. The developers, in turn, prioritize fixing vulnerabilities with high-critical CVSS. However, these standard scores don’t account for other key factors, such as which application the vulnerability resides in. For instance, teams should prioritize a medium CVSS vulnerability in a business-critical application over a critical CVSS vulnerability in an internal-facing application.

Typical application vulnerability management solely relies on CVSS, which doesn’t tell the whole story of a given vulnerability.

Limitation #3: Traditional vulnerability management requires developers to leave their native environment to conduct scanning. 

Because vulnerability management has existed for so long, it has a few legacy elements. One of these outdated practices is the idea that developers must jump to a separate security platform to test early in the SDLC.

This level of context shifting doesn’t work, as developers already have to take responsibility for so many other areas of application development. Instead, teams must consider how to better incorporate testing and other vulnerability management staples into native workflows, such as scanning and offering real-time, actionable learning and remediation advice from within development platforms.

Typical application vulnerability management assumes that developers must scan and remediate their code in a separate security platform — a context shift they don’t have the time or bandwidth to do effectively. 

Limitation #4: Traditional vulnerability management aims to bring all vulnerabilities into one view.

Vulnerability management also falls short because it attempts to consolidate all vulnerabilities into a single view. However, this goal is unrealistic in a complex development environment, as more vulnerabilities will always appear over time. Instead, teams should focus on gaining the context of business-critical applications first and then work from there. In most cases, there is no need to collect a comprehensive count of all vulnerabilities within a given organization. 

Typical application vulnerability management aims to consolidate all vulnerabilities into a single view — an unrealistic goal that’s ineffective for gaining true context for risk.

How Snyk helps with vulnerability management

Snyk’s approach to application security follows a contextual, risk-based, and developer-first approach that directly addresses the limitations of traditional vulnerability management. Our tooling offers the following practices and perspectives:

• Security testing, such as SAST and SCA, from within the developers’ native environments. Development teams can find and fix vulnerabilities and gain valuable education about each flagged issue — all from within their CLIs.

• Application security posture management, which offers an asset-first approach for businesses to prioritize their most critical assets based on business importance rather than generic CVSS.

• Context-driven security fixes that won’t break other key areas of your application, powered by the deep business and application context from ASPM.

Learn more about how ASPM can take your vulnerability management to the next level.