As American journalist and essayist HL Mencken once wrote: “For every complex problem there is a solution that is concise, clear, simple, and wrong.” Anyone working in or around vulnerability remediation knows the apparently ‘simple’ task of applying a patch is anything but. The vulnerability lifecycle is filled with pitfalls and deceptively complex tasks.Anyone working in or around vulnerability remediation knows that the apparently ‘simple’ task of applying a patch is anything but. The vulnerability lifecycle is filled with pitfalls.The time and effort needed to remediate any single vulnerability across an entire enterprise are often underestimated. This creates an obvious and urgent demand for prioritisation, which requires we understand more about the world of vulnerabilities. Michael Roytman of Kenna Security and Jay Jacobs at the Cyentia Institute explore what the open vulnerability landscape looks like and investigate multiple factors contributing to the remediation efforts.

Organizations simply cannot reduce their risk and improve their security posture without having some way to predict, ahead of time, which threats and vulnerabilities will actually lead to an attack.

We exist in a dualstage testing regime. We are subject to a low prevalence (rare event) environment. To act rationally in this scenario, the first test must remove as many false negatives as it can.

We have the better, if harder, problem of the meta-analysis (“research about research”) of many observations, always remembering that the purpose of security metrics is decision support.

Using CVSS to steer remediation is nuts, ineffective, deeply diseconomic, and knee jerk; given the availability of data it is also passé, which we will now demonstrate.