You've Got a Vulnerability Scan Report. Now What?

It was always the same. I got to work early to find a document on my desk. A landscape mode spreadsheet in 8 pt print. Usually over a dozen pages long. There's always a post-it note helpfully letting me know that I need to peruse the document, find my devices, and let someone know my strategy to resolve the "issues". When I say someone, I recognized the handwriting, it was always the same person.

It's pre-audit season and the internal auditors have run their scans and want everyone to resolve their Critical and High severity vulnerabilities. This began the week long dash to find my devices, determine what I need to do to what, and how. Then we get to start the easter egg hunt we called "patch and pray".

We were never sure which, if any, patch addressed any given CVE in the list. You've been there as well I'd bet.

Most vulnerability scan reports are long, noisy, and hard to act on.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of findings. The numbers can be quite overwhelming, and provide no clear sense of what to do first.

The scanner did its job. Now you’re left holding the output.

That’s where most get stuck.

The problem isn’t the scan. It’s what comes next. Next, and who's responsible for it is never quite as clear as many think, especially in matrix organizations where everyone seems to be someone else's internal customer.

Besides, not all findings matter equally.

Some map cleanly to patches and can be resolved quickly. Some are technically valid but low impact. Some look critical but don’t actually apply in your environment.

Without context, everything starts to look urgent, which means nothing is urgent.

The goal isn’t necessarily to fix everything.

It’s to fix what actually reduces risk.

That usually comes down to a few things:

• figuring out which findings are real problems versus noise

• grouping related issues into a practical remediation plan

• aligning fixes with what’s actually exposed or in use

• ignoring findings that don’t move reduce risk

Most reports don’t help you do that. They just list everything. Oh sure, they dutifully provide a severity code, which is helpful to a point. But there’s still that lingering sense that something’s missing.

What you need is a way to turn the report into a prioritized plan of action with a clear endpoint.

Something that answers:

• What matters?

• What can we fix quickly?

• What actually reduces risk?

• What can we safely ignore for now?

• When are we done?

If you’ve worked through one of these reports, you already know that clarity is difficult to attain. When it's my turn, I just want to grr my way through it and get it over to move to the next project. It wasn't until recently that I understood that clarity was there to be had.

If you’re sitting on a report and trying to make sense of it, that’s the kind of work I focus on.