Tenable on Monday announced the general availability of a new service designed to help organizations identify the vulnerabilities that have the highest likelihood of being exploited.
Predictive Prioritization is currently available for Tenable customers using the Tenable.sc on-premises vulnerability management solution, but it will be added to Tenable.io, the cloud-based version, later this year.
The cybersecurity firm has pointed out that of the more than 16,000 new vulnerabilities disclosed in 2018, only 7 percent had an exploit available and Tenable estimates that only 3 percent will actually be exploited.
Many experts agree that prioritizing patching based on CVSS scores can be highly ineffective – the method creates a vulnerability overload and places a lot of pressure on security teams.
Tenable’s new Predictive Prioritization service aims to address this by helping organizations identify those 3 percent of security holes that are actually likely to be exploited in attacks.
Using data from over 150 sources, Predictive Prioritization helps calculate a vulnerability priority rating (VPR) for each vulnerability. Unlike the CVSS score, which is static, the VPR is updated daily based on the latest threat information and it helps predict if a flaw will be exploited in the next 28 days.
“Predictive Prioritization is a massive innovation in vulnerability management. It will change the way companies run their vulnerability management programs by giving them a new level of insight on where to focus based on threats to the business,” said Renaud Deraison, co-founder and CTO of Tenable. “Predictive Prioritization is unprecedented in the vulnerability management market and will help organizations answer foundational questions about where they’re exposed and what vulnerabilities to prioritize for remediation based on the threat landscape — two questions that are critical for achieving Cyber Exposure.”
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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