Common Vulnerability Management Challenges

There is much more to vulnerability management than running a scanner and applying every missing patch that gets reported. Done well, it reduces business risk by allowing teams to focus effort where it matters most. Done poorly, it wastes resources, creates alert fatigue in teams, and leaves critical exposures unaddressed.

Effective vulnerability management is a challenge for many organisations, even with large investments in scanning technologies and remediation procedures. This article explores the common pitfalls that undermine vulnerability management programmes and provides practical strategies to overcome these challenges.

Common Pitfalls

Before examining the challenges, let’s clarify what effective vulnerability management can look like. Vulnerability management is a systematic, continuous process of identifying, assessing, prioritising, and remediating security vulnerabilities across an organisation’s assets. It’s not merely a technical exercise but a programme that requires people, processes, and technology to reduce the actual business risk.

Treating All Findings Equally

What It Looks Like:

Everything that is raised as a vulnerability by a scanner is treated with the same urgency: every CVE requiring immediate attention, regardless of context.

Why It Happens:

Lack of risk context to the business, pressure to show remediation activity, or immature processes that emphasise quantity over quality. Severity scores (like CVSS) are used as the sole measure of risk without considering exploitability or business impact.

Impact:

Security teams waste precious time patching low-risk issues whilst high-impact and actively exploitable vulnerabilities remain open.

How to Avoid It:

• Implement a risk-based prioritisation that considers:
  • CVSS score as a starting point, not the definitive measure
  • Whether an exploit is available in the wild
  • Asset criticality and, crucially, the business impact of the asset
  • Exposure level (whether it is internet-facing vs. an internal system)
• Use threat intelligence to prioritise items
• Define severity-based SLAs that are linked to business risk, not just technical scores
• Create tiered remediation workflows with different handling for different risk levels

Unreliable Asset Inventory / Unknown Assets

What It Looks Like:

An incomplete or inaccurate asset inventory leads to security teams being unaware of all assets in their environment. Scanners miss assets, or IT/Development teams deploy shadow servers and unmanaged cloud resources that escape security visibility.

Why It Happens:

Asset discovery is often a one-time exercise, or it relies on manual processes that are not kept up-to-date. Rapidly changing environments (especially in cloud and DevOps) make it difficult to maintain an accurate inventory.

Impact:

Security blind spots that attackers can exploit; metrics that are measured as “percentage of scanned assets” often become misleading and create false confidence and knowledge bases.

How to Avoid It:

• Maintain a canonical asset inventory and ensure it is reconciled with scanning results
• Deploy multiple discovery mechanisms:
  • Network scanning for on-premise assets
  • Cloud resource tagging and discovery
  • EDR telemetry to identify endpoints
  • CMDB integration with orchestration tools
• Treat asset discovery as a continuous process rather than a periodic exercise
• Establish processes for onboarding new assets to vulnerability management workflows
• Implement automated alerting for newly discovered assets

Treating Vulnerability Scanning as Complete Vulnerability Management

What It Looks Like:

Organisations purchase scanning tools and run periodic scans, but consider their obligation fulfilled. Results from one commercial or open-source scanner are assumed to have full coverage.

Why It Happens:

Over-reliance on a single tool, a lack of understanding of vulnerability management scope, or budget constraints that limit tool diversity.

Impact:

False negatives and false positives, missed configuration issues, or a limited view of vulnerabilities. The false confidence that all vulnerabilities are being detected.

How to Avoid It:

• Develop a formal vulnerability management lifecycle with clearly defined stages
• Use multiple detection methods:
  • Authenticated and unauthenticated network scans
  • SAST/DAST for application scanning
  • Container scanning and IaC analysis
  • Penetration testing for high-risk assets or environments
• Perform credentialed scans where possible to reduce false positives and improve accuracy
• Correlate findings across tools to improve signal-to-noise ratio
• Establish processes for each phase beyond scanning
  • Triage and prioritisation
  • Remediation planning and execution
  • Verification of fixes
  • Reporting and metrics

Poor Triage and Slow Remediation Cycles

What It Looks Like:

Security teams generate lengthy vulnerability reports and send them to IT operations with little context or guidance. Tasks or tickets start to pile up, remediation takes a long time, or issues are marked as “fixed” without verification.

Why It Happens:

Limited resources, lack of prioritisation guidance, or poor communication between security and operations teams.

Impact:

Vulnerabilities remain unaddressed for extended periods, leading to increased risk exposure. A higher number of vulnerabilities accumulate, creating a backlog that becomes unmanageable.

How to Avoid It:

• Define clear workflows and responsibilities for vulnerability management
• Create cross-functional vulnerability management teams with representation from security, operations, and development
• Provide contextual information with vulnerability reports, including business impact and remediation guidance
• Apply SLA tiers based on risk levels and exploitability
• Use automated ticketing with rich context (asset owner, business impact, suggested remediation steps)
• Encourage patch automation where safe (canary deployments, phased rollouts, etc.)
• Establish regular forums to discuss remediation progress and challenges

Ignoring Configuration Vulnerabilities and Baseline Drift

What It Looks Like:

Security teams focus primarily on software vulnerabilities (CVEs) and patching, while configuration or authorisation issues are overlooked.

Why It Happens:

Security teams often lack visibility into configuration management; tools mainly target software vulnerabilities rather than secure configurations, which can often miss context. Baseline configurations are not monitored for drift, leading to inconsistent security postures.

Impact:

Configuration vulnerabilities can lead to significant security incidents, such as privilege escalation, data breaches, or service disruptions. Attackers can exploit misconfigurations to bypass security controls or gain unauthorised access.

How to Avoid It:

• Incorporate configuration assessment into vulnerability management:
  • CIS benchmarks and compliance frameworks
  • IaC scanning for Terraform/Cloudformation
  • Container hardening and secure by default configurations
• Detect configuration drift through regular baseline comparison
• Enforce security standards through policy-as-code
• Perform trend analysis to identify recurring vulnerability patterns
• Implement secure-by-design principles in your architecture

Not Integrating Vulnerability Management into DevOps / CI Pipelines

What It Looks Like:

Security testing is an afterthought, with vulnerability scans run post-deployment into production environments. Developers receive findings late in the cycle, often after code has been merged or deployed.

Why It Happens:

Security is treated as a separate function, with no integration into the development lifecycle. “Shift left” remains a concept rather than a practice, leading to late-stage vulnerability discovery.

Impact:

Vulnerabilities are discovered too late, leading to rushed fixes, increased risk of introducing new bugs and potential service disruptions. Security becomes a bottleneck in the development process rather than an enabler.

How to Avoid It:

• Developer training on secure coding practices and vulnerability awareness
• Establish secure coding practices that prevent recurring vulnerabilities
• “Shift left” by integrating security tools into CI pipelines from the start
• Implement SAST and DAST tools to catch vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle
• Fail quality assurance quickly on critical vulnerabilities to prevent merging insecure code
• Use pull request checks and dependency update automation to reduce drift
• Create feedback loops from production vulnerability findings to development workflows

Poor Communication and Fragmented Ownership

What It Looks Like:

Security teams operate in silos, raising tickets for vulnerabilities without engaging with application or operations teams. Security is seen as a compliance function rather than as a critical partner in risk management .

Why It Happens:

Security teams lack visibility into business context, leading to misalignment with IT and development priorities. There is often no clear ownership of vulnerability remediation across teams.

Impact:

Vulnerabilities are not remediated in a timely manner, leading to increased risk exposure. Security teams become frustrated with IT’s lack of action, while IT feels overwhelmed by security’s demands.

How to Avoid It:

• Define clear ownership for assets and vulnerability remediation responsibilities
• Establish a security governance framework that includes cross-functional teams
• Communicate the impact in business terms (service risk, customer impact) rather than technical jargon
• Create shared metrics and goals between security and IT teams
• Provide executive dashboards that translate vulnerability data into quantifiable business risk

Failing to Verify Remediation

What It Looks Like:

Security tickets are closed without verifying that the vulnerability has been properly addressed. Teams assume fixes are effective based on ticket status rather than actual verification.

Why It Happens:

Remediation processes are not formalised or teams lack the resources/knowledge to validate the remediation efforts. There may also be a culture of “closing tickets” rather than ensuring actual risk reduction.

Impact:

Unverified fixes lead to recurring vulnerabilities, wasted effort, and a false sense of security. Critical issues may remain unaddressed in production environments, leading to potential breaches.

How to Avoid It:

• Establish a formal verification processes after remediation:
  • This can include rescanning, manual verification, or peer reviews
  • Use an independent team to verify critical fixes
• Confirm the implemented fixes in production environments if possible
• Implement regression testing to ensure fixes don’t break functionality
• Track the remediation efficacy and “re-open” rates
• Root-cause analysis for failed remediation efforts to improve processes going forward

Inadequate Measurement and Continuous Improvement

What It Looks Like:

Vulnerability management is treated as a “set and forget” process, with little focus on measuring effectiveness or improving practices over time. Reporting focuses on the quantity of vulnerabilities found and closed rather than a qualitative assessment of risk reduction.

Why It Happens:

Security teams focus on compliance metrics (e.g., number of vulnerabilities closed) rather than business outcomes. There is a lack of maturity in vulnerability management practices, leading to a reactive rather than proactive approach. Stakeholders see value in activity rather than outcomes.

Impact:

Vulnerability management becomes a box-ticking exercise rather than a strategic risk reduction programme. Teams become reactive, responding to the latest scanner findings without understanding the broader risk context.

How to Avoid It:

• Track outcome-focused KPIs rather than just activity metrics
• Implement tabletop exercises to validate vulnerability response processes
• Use smarter metrics that can provide a more qualitative view of risk reduction
• Establish a continuous improvement cycle with regular reviews of processes, tools, and metrics

Building an Effective Vulnerability Management Programme

Practical Implementation Checklist

• Maintain a reconciled asset inventory (cloud + on-premise + ephemeral resources)
• Enable authenticated scanning wherever possible to improve detection accuracy
• Implement risk-based vulnerability management combining CVSS, exploitability, exposure, asset criticality and threat intelligence
• Integrate security testing into CI/CD pipelines to shift vulnerability detection left
• Automate ticket creation with context and practical remediation guidance
• Define and monitor SLAs by risk tier with appropriate escalation paths
• Implement verification scanning before closing remediation tickets
• Include IaC, container and third-party package scanning for supply chain risk coverage
• Schedule regular penetration tests for high-value assets
• Publish a vulnerability management policy and exception process with governance

Measuring Success: Key Performance Indicators

Effective vulnerability management requires meaningful metrics that focus on outcomes rather than activity. Consider implementing these KPIs:

Effective Vulnerability Management is a Journey

Effective vulnerability management isn’t achieved through tools alone but through thoughtfully designed processes, cross-functional collaboration, and a contextual risk-based approach. By avoiding these common pitfalls, organisations can start to transform their vulnerability management from an overwhelming technical burden into a strategic security programme that demonstrably reduces risk.

The most successful vulnerability management programmes understand that vulnerabilities are a business risk issue, not merely a technical problem. They share common characteristics: executive support, clear governance, risk-based prioritisation, integrated tooling, and continuous improvement. With these elements in place, organisations can move beyond “scan and pray” to achieve genuine security improvements through systematic, prioritised vulnerability reduction.

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