A guide to vulnerability remediation vs mitigation

Vulnerabilities are weaknesses in systems that weaken security and can be exploited by cybercriminals, often found through curiosity-driven exploration or malicious probing. Modern IT environments face an ever-evolving landscape of new vulnerabilities, requiring businesses to continually identify and mitigate them before they become exploited. Vulnerability management is a systematic approach to continuously identify and eliminate vulnerabilities, involving asset discovery, vulnerability scanning, prioritization, risk assessment, and remediation or mitigation. Remediation aims to fix or eliminate vulnerabilities, while mitigation decreases the possibility of exploitation, often through temporary measures such as segmentation or patching. Effective vulnerability management requires ongoing strategy, metrics tracking, and automation to improve remediation and mitigation processes, and should prioritize complete remediation over long-term mitigation solutions.