Most businesses can't keep up with the influx of vulnerabilities affecting their software and infrastructure: every six months the average firm fails to patch 28% of the vulnerabilities in their hardware and software, leading to a backlog of more than 57,000 unfixed security issues, a new study found.
Such a security "debt" leaves companies vulnerable, according to the Ponemon Institute study, which was released today by IBM. More than half of organizations suffered a security breach in the past year, and 42% of those respondents blame the breach on a known but unpatched security vulnerability. In addition, most companies — 57% — have not identified which vulnerabilities pose a highest risk, and only a quarter of firms are prioritizing vulnerabilities based on business impact.
The underlying problem is that once vulnerabilities have been identified by automated systems, the prioritization and patching process is mostly manual, which slows an organization's response, says Charles Henderson, global managing partner and head of IBM's cybersecurity services team, X-Force Red.
"You think of vulnerability management as 'find a flaw, fix a flaw,'" he says. "The problem is that we have gotten really good at finding flaws, and we haven't seen ... as an industry the same attention paid to actually fixing stuff that we find."
Patching continues to be a significant problem for most companies. Only 21% of organizations patch vulnerabilities in a timely manner, the survey found. More than half of companies cannot easily track how efficiently vulnerabilities are being patched, have enough resources to patch the volume of issues, nor have a common way of viewing assets and applications across the company. In addi ..
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