Every organization faces an ever-expanding list of vulnerabilities across cloud environments, on-prem infrastructure, applications, and endpoints. Prioritizing which issues to fix first is one of the most difficult challenges for security teams, especially when traditional vulnerability management focuses solely on severity scores without considering the broader risk landscape.
Enter Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) — an approach that integrates business context, threat intelligence, and critical asset prioritization to fix what truly matters. RBVM isn’t just about checking compliance boxes; it’s about strengthening resilience against actual threats.
To illustrate how RBVM works in practice, let’s follow the journey of Acme Logistics, a technology company, as they adopt this smarter approach to managing vulnerabilities.
Acme Logistics, a growing freight tech company, relied on a sophisticated digital platform to manage dispatch, delivery tracking, and payment processing. They regularly scanned their systems using Tenable Nessus to identify vulnerabilities. Yet despite their compliance-driven approach, they suffered a breach when attackers exploited an unpatched API vulnerability.
The vulnerability had been marked as “medium severity” by their scanning tool and was buried deep in their backlog of thousands of other alerts. Unfortunately, it allowed attackers to disrupt their operations and access sensitive customer information.
In the aftermath, Acme’s leadership realized that they needed to shift from a reactive, checklist-based approach to a risk-driven strategy. This required new processes and deeper integrations between their security tools to enable smarter decision-making.
RBVM focuses on assessing vulnerabilities in the context of business risk. Instead of treating every vulnerability as equally urgent, it prioritizes those most likely to impact critical business functions. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the process:
The first step in RBVM is understanding what assets are in your environment and their business value. Acme Logistics integrated Lacework with their cloud environments to automatically discover and classify workloads. They tagged mission-critical APIs, customer databases, and payment systems as high-priority assets. Lacework automated discovery and behavioral monitoring for cloud workloads.
RBVM relies on continuous, automated scanning to identify new vulnerabilities as they emerge. Acme combined Nessus for on-prem infrastructure and Qualys for endpoint scanning, ensuring full visibility into their attack surface. Nessus provided Comprehensive on-prem vulnerability scanning. Qualys was used for Cloud-based vulnerability management for endpoints and servers.
Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. By integrating Rapid7 InsightVM, Acme gained access to real-time threat intelligence, allowing them to assess which vulnerabilities were being actively exploited in the wild. This helped their security team prioritize patches based on actual threat activity. Rapid7 InsightVM provides dynamic threat intelligence and risk scoring for better prioritization.
RBVM combines vulnerability data, threat intelligence, and asset importance to generate a risk score. Acme used TruOps to assign risk levels to vulnerabilities, focusing on those with high exploitation potential.
By correlating this information with business impact, Acme’s security team could communicate effectively with leadership, highlighting the true risks to the business rather than overwhelming them with technical details.
One of the biggest pain points in traditional vulnerability management is the manual handoff between security and IT teams. Acme solved this using TruOps platform’s integration with ServiceNow to automatically generate and prioritize tickets for high-risk vulnerabilities. ServiceNow automated the creation, assignment, and tracking of remediation tasks, syncing with TruOps.
RBVM isn’t just about patching vulnerabilities. Sometimes, compensating controls such as firewall rules or runtime protection can be faster and less disruptive. In cases like this, exceptions can be created for compensating controls.
In Acme’s case, they used a web application firewall (WAF) to deploy a virtual patch for the vulnerable API while planning a more permanent fix.
Security is an ongoing journey. Acme implementation with Truops enabled the security team to continuously monitor risk levels and track the effectiveness of their remediation efforts. They also used TruOps Reporting to generate audit-ready reports for compliance purposes.
By adopting RBVM and integrating their security tools, Acme Logistics transformed their vulnerability management process:
Traditional vulnerability management is no longer sufficient in today’s fast-paced threat landscape. RBVM offers a smarter, more efficient approach by aligning vulnerability management with business risk.
For companies navigating complex environments, the key to success lies in integrating RBVM with existing security tools and workflows, from scanning solutions like Tenable, Qualys, and Lacework to automated ticketing platforms like ServiceNow and Jira.
RBVM is about making security decisions based on business context rather than arbitrary severity scores. It empowers organizations to focus their resources where it matters most, reducing risk and improving operational efficiency.
Whether you’re a small startup or an enterprise with a sprawling attack surface, adopting TruOps’ RBVM and robust integrations with the right vulnerability tools can be the difference between staying secure and being blindsided by the next breach.
The tool is very powerful and by using the various modules, we can centralize a lot of oversight and governance of our issues, vulnerabilities, risks, vendors, control framework, compliance and risk assessments. Given the flexibility of the tool, we can tailor it to meet our specific needs. I would say the biggest advantage and differentiator with TruOps is the support and expertise you get along with the tool. The support staff is extremely responsive, helpful and very knowledgeable in risk management. Not only do you get support resources that are always willing and ready to help, but you get high quality risk advice and guidance.
Director – Information Security & Risk, leading Health Care
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