How do you deal with the stress and pressure of vulnerability scanning work?

Manage vulnerability scan stress: • Practice breaking down the tasks according to levels of urgency and importance. • Stretch or take a walk to prevent burn outs. • Knowing the latest tools and techniques will enhance efficiency and confidence. • Employ stress-busting techniques in the forms of meditation, deep breathing exercises, and yoga your daily regime. • Take suggestion or opinion from colleagues or mentor, if required. • Spend time with family, hobbies, and recreational activities. • Exercise moderately, eat healthy, and sleep well. • Set goals that are achievable.

There are also many times that a vulnerability scan will discover systems that are out of date, or just not needed. The dealing of those could result in additional scopes of work, so don't be too afraid to find things and deal with them in a timely and profitable way.

From my experience as a Cybersecurity Consultant, I've learned the value of crafting a clear scope of work before scanning. This involves defining our authorized assets and approach details. By doing so, we steer clear of technical hurdles and concentrate on the most significant vulnerabilities, nurturing a more impactful cybersecurity strategy.

There are also SaaS applications, such as Nodeware, that run continuously and scan all assets/IP addresses every day, without having to schedule. It also provides detailed remediation recipes that save tons of time and stress along the way.

This is an important point. There are always some false positive. It is good idea to review the scan results, interpret, analyze and validate them.

This will also help you prioritize the most critical and time-sensitive vulnerabilities found. There may be some devices that have known vulnerabilities, e.g. a Windows 7 device for a specific purpose, that needs to be managed differently, where you're accepting the risk and handling/protecting in other ways.

While reporting vulnerabilities to stakeholder it is important that to relate them to the business risk. That will help remediating them quickly.

Automation is extremely important in this process, however, verification and validation must be done accordingly. The process should be easily able to duplicate, rinse, and repeat. The more processes that are in place as well as standards, the more successful a vulnerability management program will be as a whole.

Keeping systems and applications up-to-date with the latest patches reduces the number of vulnerabilities & the associated stress of managing them. We implemented a strict patch management policy, using tools like WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) to automate the deployment of updates. Regular patching reduced the number of vulnerabilities we had to scan for and manage, making our security posture more robust. Incorporating threat intelligence feeds into vulnerability scanning processes helps prioritise high-risk vulnerabilities, allowing focused and efficient remediation. By integrating threat intelligence feeds from services like ThreatConnect into our scanning tools, we prioritised vulnerabilities based on current threat landscapes.

Have compensating controls to cover vulnerabilities not yet patched or can’t be patched is paramount, for example, network isolation with host based access control and network rules to allow only protocols for what needed to function. Having AI driven threat detection can monitor for compromise of those vulnerable assets.