You can create an effective vulnerability assessment report by:
- Ensuring documentation is clear and concise.
- Writing for a specific audiences in mind.
- Making it actionable.
- Including findings and metrics.
- Establishing POA&Ms.
- Showing success and work completed.
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Typical vulnerability assessment reports are designed for IT and security professionals to review.
This is not a problem since these teams support the tool and know the environment, however, presenting the same level of reporting to your leadership team generally does not convey the true value of your vulnerability management program.
If the report contains pages of vulnerabilities and is not presented to your executive management team, it will be difficult to receive continued support for future investments.
Although your goal is to implement vulnerability best practices, this may eventually lead to burnout if your efforts are not realized.
If the report contains pages of vulnerabilities and is not presented to your executive management team, it will be difficult to receive continued support for future investments.
In this article, we will discuss what vulnerability reporting should look like for your leadership team.
Why Vulnerability Assessment Reporting Fails
Timelines
Establishing SLAs is critical in reducing risk. The longer a system remains unpatched due to a zero-day or critical severity, the odds of an exploit increase exponentially. Measuring and recording remediation metrics is important and should be included in the vulnerability report.
Completed Work
Ensure the report illustrates the ratio of open to closed remediated vulnerabilities. Tracking closed incidents will help determine if additional resources are needed.
Ensure infrastructure and security teams that participate in the testing and patch management process are commended for their efforts and recognized for their contributions.
Currently Accepted Risk
Document exceptions or accepted risks by the business owners. This lets you track the risk appetite of your organization.
A high number of accepted risks may indicate an issue with policy SLAs. High trending over time for accepted risks should trigger a review of your risk acceptance policies.
Key Elements Of A Successful Vulnerability Assessment Report
1. Be Clear & Concise
The report should be free of data that does not clearly illustrate risk and the impact on business operations.
Precise information that targets risk related to key assets will provide the most value. Concise reporting with illustrative graphs or charting is highly recommended.
Ideally, choose three top-level statistics that you want to showcase and build graphics, along with trend lines, to measure and prove the progress of your program.
In addition, you should include an executive summary, usually one page which is a high-level summary section, and a few charts that visualize the key metrics scaled to a period.
2. Know Your Audience
Prepare reporting with two audiences in mind:
- Technical Infrastructure Teams – Developers, Server Teams, Application owners. These teams need to know what and how to remediation specific vulnerabilities. This type of report is usually technical in format and provides guidance and recommendations on remediation efforts.
- Executives – Although some executives may have technical backgrounds, it is recommended to summarize the results with precise details illustrated with a few charts. Executives are looking to understand the impact and what the report is telling them about the business.
3. Make It Actionable
Making vulnerability assessments actionable involves a series of strategic steps that transform the insights gained from the assessment into tangible security enhancements.
The assessment should result in a comprehensive report detailing all discovered vulnerabilities, their severity, and potential impact, along with suggested solutions.
The remediation recommendations should be based on or defined in your service level agreement as stated in your vulnerability assessment policy.
Remediation may involve installing security patches or making configuration changes, while mitigation strategies might be employed when immediate fixes are not available, aiming to reduce the risk until a permanent solution is found.
Vulnerability management, an overarching strategy that encompasses continuous scanning, assessment, and the management of vulnerabilities, ensures that this process doesn’t end with a single assessment but continues as an integral part of your cybersecurity defense.
4. Include Findings & Metrics
The output of the report should capture and illustrate remediation metrics.
The report should rank vulnerability findings per severity level – Critical, High, Medium, and Low. Systems with the highest priority should be illustrated along with a risk metric. This will help leadership understand the risk and impact to the business.
The top vulnerability metrics to include in your reporting are:
- Mean Time To Patch (MTTP) – Average time it takes to patch a vulnerability. Generally calculated by subtracting the difference in time between the official release date of a patch and the time it takes to install the patch on the average of supported assets. The MTTP time should not exceed the number of days between the next maintenance period.
- Median Time to Respond/Remediate (MTTR) – Measurement of time elapsed between the occurrence of a security incident, time of discovery, when it was investigated, and contained.
- Median Time to Detect (MTTD) – The average length of time it takes a cyber security team to discover incidents within their environment.
5. Establish A Plan Of Action And Milestones (POA&Ms)
It is critical to define the length of time a vulnerability should be remediated based on its severity level or priority.
Once this is understood and communicated to your infrastructure teams, plans of action and milestones will then be established. Create a model that illustrates the number of vulnerabilities per severity level over time.
Demonstrating the trending is valuable and will help your audience understand the value of the risk metrics.
Tracking POA&Ms will help you make better strategic decisions for managing risk and demonstrate value to the executive leadership team.
6. Show Success & Work Completed
Once POA&Ms have been established and the infrastructure teams are provided with a path for resolving vulnerabilities, it is now time to show the work that has been done by the teams.
The final report should show the successes as well as the remaining open events.
This data can be used to illustrate the progress and maturity of the program over time.
Example Of A Vulnerability Assessment Report
A vulnerability assessment report comprehensively reviews an organization’s system/network vulnerabilities.
This report should include:
- Executive Summary: Concise overview of critical findings and potential impacts for non-technical stakeholders.
- Assessment Scope: Details on evaluated systems, networks, assets, and any exclusions.
- Methodology: Techniques, tools, and criteria used for vulnerability identification and evaluation.
- Vulnerability Details: Core section with in-depth information on each identified vulnerability:
- Description
- Affected assets
- Severity rating (e.g. CVSS scores)
- Potential exploitation impacts
- Remediation/mitigation recommendations
- External references (CVEs, etc.)
- Remediation Plan: Clear, actionable steps for addressing each vulnerability through patching, configuration changes, or additional controls.
- Conclusion: Summary of findings, critical vulnerabilities, overall security posture, and general vulnerability management recommendations.
- Appendices: Supplementary information like scan results, technical methodology explanations, and terminology glossary.
Vulnerability Details To Include In Reports
- Vulnerability Name – This is generally a description of the vulnerability based on the scan engine or CVSS score and description.
- Severity – Vulnerabilities are weighted to provide a scale of criticality. In most cases, Severity levels are ranked 1 – 5, 5 is Critical, 4 is High, 3 medium, 2 Low, 1 is informational.
- Create Date – The create date is the starting point for the metrics – MTTD, MTTR, and MTTP.
- Organization’s Risk Rating – Based on current open vulnerabilities across your organization weighted by the business impact of the system. Establish SLAs based on if said vulnerability is not remediated within the established timeline. A breach of an SLA will present a higher risk to the organization.
Traditional Reporting VS Reporting Based On Risk
Traditional reporting provides a sum of all vulnerabilities based on severity level. A risk-based vulnerability management report is based on the calculation of risk factors.
- Prioritization of the asset – how important it is to the business.
- Asset context – description and relevant attributes.
- Risk appetite – tolerance level for open vulnerabilities.
The report should also include exceptions or accepted risks that have been approved for non-remediation.
This information should be illustrated in a trending chart that depicts the current security posture compared to the results of the previous report.
How To Report On Vulnerabilities To Management
One of the key steps in reporting vulnerabilities is to know the audience. Understand that the role of executive leadership is to lead the business, not vulnerabilities.
So, the effectiveness of the reporting depends on how well the results are summarized and communicated.
Let’s review a sample of topics to include in the vulnerability management report:
- Create An Executive Summary
- Report On Crown Jewels
- Create A Risk Metric
- Set A Reporting Cadence
- Dashboard Reporting
Create An Executive Summary
This section should be concise and brief. Risk to the business is generally illustrated here within a chart and explained in non-technical terms. Communicate your action items and next steps, to reduce risk in within your established timelines.
Report On Crown Jewels
Reporting on the systems that have the highest impact to the business is important to the management team. Be sure to identify and prioritize the most critical assets and highlight the risks associated with these systems.
Communicate the risk impact if a critical system is breached and illustrate this measurement in a chart or metric. Communicate upcoming or future efforts to remediate issues and lower risk.
Create A Risk Metric
Each organization will be different in their approach and appetite for managing risk. Identify your critical assets and create a custom risk classification or asset tagging if needed.
Set A Reporting Cadence
Set up a re-occurring meeting with your stakeholders to review the reports. Meetings with infrastructure teams are generally held more frequently, to reduce MTTR.
Whereas management meetings are usually low in frequency, monthly or quarterly.
- Monthly Reports – These reports provide a breakdown summary of compliance and remediation statistics. These reports can be designed for a specific business unit and presented to the infrastructure team, project team members, or 3rd party vendors as required.
- Quarterly Reports – This meeting is typically higher level in nature and is geared for management teams. The purpose of the meeting is to present a high-level overview of the program and report the status of key milestones and objectives. This meeting usually includes leaders of the infrastructure team, project leads, 3rd party vendors as needed, and key executive stakeholders.
- Annual Reports – The purpose of the annual report is to review objectives and discuss new initiatives. The annual report can also be used to illustrate trends for the past year and establish new goals for the upcoming year.
Dashboard Reporting
Dashboard reporting provides a real or point-in-time view of metrics that can supplement your existing reports. Dashboards allow you to control access to who and what metrics your audience can view.
You can create an executive dashboard for managers or a general view for infrastructure teams or business units for up-to-date statistics. Dashboards generally provide an export feature that allows the generation of instant reports.
Wrapping Up
Vulnerability management reporting is a critical component of the vulnerability management process. In this article, we have reviewed the benefits of continuous vulnerability reporting and the metric types that should be included within the report.
We also discussed how to present the vulnerability report to executive management and the importance of prioritizing assets to create risk scores for your most critical assets.
Finally, we highlighted features of PurpleSec’s automated Vulnerability Management platform and the value it provides for organizations interested in supercharging their vulnerability management reporting.
If you would like to learn more about the reporting platform or PurpleSec’s approach to Vulnerability Management, schedule a demo today to speak with a security expert.
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