Find vulnerabilities. Patch vulnerabilities. Repeat. Sound familiar? What worked just over 5 years ago—before the world of hybrid work became the norm—is no longer sufficient today.
Today’s attack surfaces are constantly evolving and ever changing. The move to remote working and SaaS-heavy environments has eroded the concept of a single “corporate network”. Yet many organizations are still using legacy vulnerability management (VM) tools to try and protect their organizations.
The result? A flood of alerts without sufficient context to prioritize risk.
It’s time to move beyond burning down a backlog of vulnerability alerts to gaining insights on your exposures and managing them—aka exposure management.
Too Much Data. Not Enough Context.
A single vulnerability scanner can identify hundreds of thousands of issues across endpoints, servers, and cloud assets. Add the data from your other vulnerability sources (EDR, for example) and that count multiplies.
Though it may seem like you’ve gained visibility of your vulnerabilities, you’re not provided with actionable insights. Is your security team sifting through endless alerts while there are missing security controls on critical systems, misconfigurations, and EOL systems posing a bigger threat?
With current vulnerability management programs, it’s likely the more vulnerabilities you find, the less effective your risk management becomes.
Traditional VM programs compound this problem because they are designed to measure coverage, not consequence. Their success is often defined by the number of scans completed or vulnerabilities identified—not by whether exposures were actually reduced.
Exploitability Changes the Equation
Traditional vulnerability management tends to focus narrowly on CVEs. Exposure management takes a broader approach so you can quantify risk. As all security teams are aware, not all vulnerabilities or exposures are equal. Some represent clear and present danger; others are unlikely ever to be exploited. By treating them the same, you’re wasting precious resources.
Exploitability is missing from many VM programs. Understanding whether a vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild, or if reliable exploit code exists, helps teams triage issues based on real-world risk.
For example:
- CVE severity scores (CVSS) are helpful starting points but don’t tell the full story. A “critical” CVE with no exploit activity might be less urgent than a “medium” vulnerability being actively weaponized.
- Threat intelligence integration transforms static CVE data into dynamic risk signals. Real-time insight into exploitation trends can immediately reprioritize remediation efforts.
- Contextual exploitability—considering factors like asset exposure, network segmentation, and compensating controls—further sharpens prioritization.
The Sevco Exposure Assessment Platforms provides continuous data collection and enrichment that can automatically correlate vulnerabilities to a comprehensive asset inventory, exploit data, threat intelligence, and asset criticality.
Why Attack Surface Visibility and Context Is a Non-Negotiable
Understanding exploitability is only part of the battle. The foundation of exposure management is having full visibility into and understanding the scope of your environment. On top of that, you need to know what devices are under enterprise control vs the ones you can observe?
Attack surface visibility and context brings clarity to chaos. It answers questions that vulnerability scanning alone can’t:
- How many total assets are in my environment?
- What user(s) are associated with each asset?
- Is an asset internet-facing or internal only?
- Does it host sensitive data or mission-critical functions?
- Are compensating controls in place?
- Can a patch be deployed immediately?
Without these insights, teams can’t accurately prioritize risk. A critical vulnerability on a decommissioned server in a quarantined network segment does not carry the same risk as an executive laptop running Windows 10 (now end of support) and missing EDR.
This is where Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) becomes essential. CAASM provides a unified, continuously updated inventory of applications, devices, users, and vulnerabilities—and the relationships between them.
When vulnerability data is mapped to asset data, you gain true insights into risk. Better data = Better decisions.
Moving From Point-in-Time to Continuous Insight
Legacy VM tools operate on a schedule. They scan weekly, monthly, or quarterly. But exposures don’t wait for scan windows.
A new asset might appear in your environment today—a shadow IT server, a developer’s test box, or an employee working from home who connects a new device. Malicious actors are working around the clock – and your employees may be too – with unprotected devices. Waiting for the next vulnerability scan may be too late.
Modern exposure management demands continuous visibility and assessment:
- Continuous discovery of new assets and configurations.
- Real-time enrichment with exploit and threat intelligence.
- Continuous validation of remediation effectiveness.
This isn’t just a technology change—it’s a change in mindset. Security teams must treat their attack surface as a continually changing ecosystem that evolves daily and take a proactive vs reactive approach.
The question is no longer “What vulnerabilities did we find with our last scan?” but “What assets are exposed right now?”
Better Exposure Management Begins with Better Data
The Sevco Exposure Assessment Platform is built upon a foundation of CAASM and provides a real-time, unified asset inventory that eliminates data silos and blind spots. Sevco delivers comprehensive data on applications, devices, users, and vulnerabilities – in a single dashboard – providing a system of record that enables security teams to focus on the exposures that actually matter to their specific business.
By providing continuous visibility, automated prioritization, and actionable context, Sevco empowers organizations to shift from reactive patching to proactive risk reduction.
Exposure management isn’t about finding more problems. It’s about seeing your environment clearly enough to fix the right ones first.
Learn how Sevco can provide you with better data to make better decisions to reduce risk. Schedule a demo today.