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Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2020 13:18:34 +0530
From: Pramod Rana <varchashva@...il.com>
To: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@...rmont.com>
Cc: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Open Source Tool | vPrioritization | Risk
Prioritization Framework
Appreciate your comments.
My two cents - Patch everything is far from reality to most (read all)
organizations and I would argue that it's not a solution per se. To me it
looks like buying every type of vehicle for commuting in every city of the
world but we don't do that, rather we decide what will work best depending
on factors like traffic, distance, roads, weather etc.
I believe prioritization is an integral part of everything we do and it
works as reasoning to what we do (or don't).
On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 3:17 PM Perry E. Metzger <perry@...rmont.com> wrote:
> [Perhaps somewhat off topic, but the original announcement felt a bit
> tangental as well.]
>
> On Thu, 3 Sep 2020 20:13:34 +0530 Pramod Rana <varchashva@...il.com>
> wrote:
> > It is no secret that today we have more vulnerabilities than we can
> > assess and remediate, timely and comprehensively. Risk
> > prioritization is a key component for any vulnerability management
> > program.
>
> I'm not sure I agree with this premise.
>
> 1. It is entirely feasible to keep even a very large organization
> comprehensively patched. There are organizations that do that.
> 2. It is not feasible to calculate a probability of exploitation of a
> given vulnerability, and it is not feasible to determine how bad the
> damage from exploitation will be. This is a classic example of "tail
> risk" where probability distributions are simply not calculable by
> normal methods.
>
> I keep hearing people in the security industry speak about scientific
> risk assessment as though it were possible. I don't think it's
> possible, and it seems cheaper to simply patch than to do some sort
> of scientific assessment and prioritization of patches.
>
> My gut reaction is that the growth of this idea is attributable
> to the large number of large, well-funded organizations that are
> none the less not capable of properly maintaining their own
> infrastructure and thus not capable of patching in a timely manner.
> (I have consulted to many such organizations.)
>
> The notion that some sort of "risk analytics" could therefore justify
> failing to patch quickly and give a rationale for maintaining an
> incapable systems management team is thus attractive. However, the
> real solution is simply to patch; a capable systems management team is
> better than the illusion of a risk calculation system, and provides
> far more benefits than simply maintaining infrastructure in a fully
> patched state.
>
> Perry
> --
> Perry E. Metzger perry@...rmont.com
>
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