SAN FRANCISCO – RSA CONFERENCE 2012 – Organizations with large and disparate IT systems are often challenged in dealing with vulnerability management initiatives and determining what order vulnerabilities should be addressed in order to more effectively improve their risk posture.
nCircle, a provider of information risk and security performance management solutions, today announced a “Patch Priority Index” which is designed to help organizations prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities that should receive immediate remediation.
Free and publicly available, nCircle’s Patch Priority Index (PPI) provides a researched list of vulnerabilities that global IT security teams can use to provide security teams a fast and efficient path to a more secure network.
Created by nCircle’s Vulnerability and Exposure Research Team (VERT), the index is compiled using a range of unique sources with security experts reviewing a variety of criteria and selecting the most severe issues that can be patched in a given month as candidates for the list. For a vulnerability to be included on the PPI list, it MUST have a patch available, nCircle said. VERT researches each vulnerability and ranks them using the following criteria:
• Attack Vector
• CVSS Score
• Availability of Public Exploit Code
• Popularity of the Service or Software
• Customer Feedback
• Worst-Case Attack Scenarios
• Attack Outcome
“Deploying software patches is a complex process even for smaller organizations,” said Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development for nCircle. “Companies need deep security knowledge to identify and prioritize the software updates that will translate into the greatest security improvements. VERT’s security experts created PPI to give every business access to an up-to-date, prioritized ‘patch immediately’ list that translates directly into a more security network.”
nCircle said the Patch Priority Index will be updated monthly and will be publicly available to any IT security professional.