Challenges In Vulnerability Management

These are the potential challenges in vulnerability management, categorized into agent-based and network scan-based approaches:

Agent-based

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1. Agent deployment: Complexities in deploying agents across diverse environments pose challenges.
2. Agent management: Ensuring continuous coverage and updates for agents across the network presents logistical hurdles.
3. Agent support and maintenance: Manual intervention is required for agent troubleshooting or restarts in case of failures.
4. Unresponsive agent: Requires manual login to server for restart.
5. Incompatibility: Compatibility conflicts with existing software or security solutions may arise.
6. Increased attack surface: Agents themselves can be vulnerable. Risks of agent evasion or tampering by malicious entities warrant attention.
7. Performance overhead: Agents may impose resource overhead and performance impacts on endpoints.
8. Scalability challenges: Managing and updating agents across large networks.
9. Privacy and compliancy: Compliance considerations regarding data privacy and monitoring emerge with agent-based solutions.
10. Missing out of network vulnerabiltiy: Most of the agents will not assess network-based and misconfiguration vulnerability, such as default password, weak cryptography in SSL or SSH.

Network Scan

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1. Limited visibility: Firewalls and network segmentation can restrict scan reach.
2. False positives: Inaccurate identification of vulnerabilities (like backport) can consume resources for investigating on non-existent vulnerabilities.
3. Network congestion: Scans can overload network resources and may disrupt scans or compromise data integrity.
4. Incomplete credential scan: May miss vulnerabilities requiring privileged access or hinder comprehenive scans due to insufficient permissions.

General

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1. Incomplete asset inventory: Inaccurate asset inventories can result in missed endpoints.
2. Prioritization: Ineffective prioritization may delay critical patching.