In today's ever-evolving digital landscape, cloud environments have become the backbone of modern businesses. However, as cloud environments grow and become more complex, the more challenging it becomes to identify vulnerabilities and understand how they can create attack paths in your environment. Traditional vulnerability management solutions alert of thousands of vulnerabilities that exist in an environment, how would your team know which vulnerabilities to focus on? 

The challenge: identifying and addressing vulnerabilities 

Vulnerabilities pose a significant risk to cloud environments, and when exploited can lead to lateral movement and breaches. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to identify all vulnerabilities within a complex environment. A prime example is the Log4j vulnerability, where organizations struggled to understand their existing infrastructure and locate all instances of vulnerable Log4j libraries. Traditional tools that rely on agents result in blind spots which could lead to missing critical vulnerabilities in the environment. Agent-based solutions also lack context around vulnerabilities and are unable to prioritize them based on business impact, leading to alert fatigue. Forrester describes this challenge in The Vulnerability Risk Management Landscape, Q2 2023 report as “The common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) alone is not sufficient to assess vulnerability risk. Business context is the most crucial factor to determine vulnerability risk yet remains the most difficult to gauge.”

A comprehensive and agentless vulnerability management solution 

Organizations need a vulnerability management solution that provides complete visibility into their cloud workloads and identifies vulnerabilities across virtual machines, serverless functions, containers, and across all their cloud environments, all without any agents. By adopting an agentless scanning approach, Wiz ensures full coverage and eliminates blind spots in the security posture. This approach also reduces the overhead of configuring and maintaining agents, automatically safeguarding new workloads as the environment expands. 

Reducing alert fatigue with contextual insights 

Wiz goes beyond conventional vulnerability management solutions by offering actionable context into risks present in the cloud environment. Wiz does deep cloud risk analysis across misconfigurations, network exposure, secrets, vulnerabilities, malware, and identities, to identify combinations of risks that can lead to an attack path in your environment. By providing you with high-fidelity alerting, Wiz enables you to focus only on critical risks that impact your environment and provides you with context on the Wiz Security Graph, actionable insights, and prioritization. This approach is described in Forrester’s The Vulnerability Risk Management Landscape, Q2 2023 report as “Attack path modeling maps asset relationships so VRM analysts can identify overly exposed assets or ones that are seemingly innocent but can lead to crown jewels. Contextualizing asset importance, and their relationships with other assets and controls, can highlight assets that warrant immediate attention.”

Let’s see this in action. In the example below, Wiz identified an attack path in the environment that results from a publicly exposed virtual machine that has a network vulnerability with a known exploit and high permissions.  

In this example, an attacker could exploit the vulnerability and access the machine through the internet, and then gain full admin access to the environment, putting it at critical risk. With this additional context around the vulnerability finding, now our team knows they need to prioritize remediation for this vulnerability over others. 

Our customer Renaissance, an education SaaS company, needed to be able to prioritize vulnerabilities to keep up with their rapid growth: 

The Security Graph adds context to the issues you’re seeing and allows you to triage them automatically. It’s about tracking down and addressing the vulnerabilities that truly impact the organization, and the Wiz Security Graph allows us to do that.

Chief Information Security Officer at Renaissance

Get started now with Wiz for Vulnerability Management, you can learn more in the Wiz docs (login needed). If you prefer a live demo, we would love to connect with you.