Review: Practical Vulnerability Management: A Strategic Approach to Managing Cyber Risk

Andrew Magnusson started his information security career 20 years ago and he decided to offer the knowledge he accumulated through this book, to help the reader eliminate security weaknesses and threats within their system.

As he points out in the introduction, bugs are everywhere, but there are actions and processes the reader can apply to eliminate or at least mitigate the associated risks.

The author starts off by explaining vulnerability management basics, the importance of knowing your network and the process of collecting and analyzing data.

He explains the importance of a vulnerability scanner and why it is essential to configure and deploy it correctly, since it gives valuable infromation to successfully complete a vulnerabilty management process.

The next step is to automate the processes, which prioritizes vulnerabilities and gives time to work on more severe issues, consequently boosting an organization’s security posture.

Finally, it is time to decide what to do with the vulnerabilities you have detected, which means choosing the appropriate security measures, whether it’s patching, mitigation or systemic measures. When the risk has a low impact, there’s also the option of accepting it, but this still needs to be documented and agreed upon.

The important part of this process, and perhaps also the hardest, is building relationships within the organization. The reader needs to respect office politics and make sure all the decisions and changes they make are approved by the superiors.

The second part of the book is practical, with the author guiding the reader through the process of building their own vulnerability management system with a detailed analysis of the open source tools they need to use such as Nmap, OpenVAS, and cve-search, everything supported by coding examples.

The reader will learn how to build an asset and vulnerability database and how to keep it accurate and up to date. This is especially important when generating reports, as those need to be based on recent vulnerability findings.

Who is it for?

Practical Vulnerability Management is aimed at security practitioners who are responsible for protecting their organization and tasked with boosting its security posture. It is assumed they are familiar with Linux and Python.

Despite the technical content, the book is an easy read and offers comprehensive solutions to keeping an organization secure and always prepared for possible attacks.