Easily remediate the CVEs most likely to harm you using Forward Enhanced Device Vulnerability Analysis

Headline grabbing vulnerabilities, like SolarWinds and Log4Shell, target management software and end hosts, but if you search for “most exploited vulnerabilities” on Google, you will quickly learn that some of them directly target network and security devices as well as server load balancers.

These are the 3 most exploited CVEs in the last couple of years:

• CVE- 2021-22986 (CVSS score: 9.8) - F5 BIG-IP remote code execution vulnerability 
• CVE-2019-19781 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway directory traversal vulnerability 
• CVE-2020-12812 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Fortinet FortiOS authentication vulnerability in SSL VPN

Would you be surprised to learn that network device operating systems can be vulnerable to security flaws like any other software? To remediate this risk, network and security administrators need a vulnerability management program in place. Having the right processes and technology in place can save time while protecting the network security posture.

A common approach is to split vulnerability management into two phases:

1. Build a list of affected devices and related vulnerabilities
2. Prioritize and address these vulnerabilities

Build a list of affected devices and related vulnerabilities 

Publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities have an assigned CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) ID number and a severity level based on their impact. CVEs help you to coordinate the efforts to prioritize and address these vulnerabilities to make systems and networks more secure. Most enterprise networks have evolved over time and include devices from several vendors running multiple versions of operating systems. Knowing that a vulnerability was announced doesn’t give a clear picture of the organization's correlative risk.  

Large enterprises do their best to keep an accurate inventory of devices and their state, but given that most companies have experienced mergers, IT department turnover, and are resource constrained, this inventory is rarely current. Because networking vendors typically fix security vulnerabilities by issuing a new OS version, a detailed and up-to-date inventory is paramount. Trying to conduct this analysis manually is expensive, time-consuming, and error prone.

To make the analysis easier, faster, and more reliable, Forward provides a network devices vulnerability analysis that automatically compares the CVE information from the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD) with OS version running on the devices in your network.

This analysis provides a list of all possibly affected devices and related vulnerabilities. “Why possibly affected?” you might ask. Keep on reading and you will find out why.

The following screenshot shows an example of network vulnerability analysis in the Forward UI.

The summary at the top shows the number of CVEs detected as well as the number of devices impacted.

The table shows a summary view of the CVEs including CVE ID, Severity, Description, Impacted OS, Impacted versions, and the number of Possibly impacted devices.

The Details page shows you information about devices that are impacted by that CVE like Device, Model, OS version, and Management IPs.

Prioritize and address vulnerabilities

One of the fundamental issues is that the number of vulnerabilities and devices affected can be overwhelming, making it difficult to prioritize which devices should be updated first. Filtering vulnerabilities by severity provides some help but typically the number of Critical and High severity vulnerabilities is still so high that it‘s challenging to determine a starting point. This is where the notion of “possibly affected devices” becomes pertinent. Some vulnerabilities can impact a device only if specific configurations are present, a specific feature is turned on, or they are deployed in a way that is explained in the CVE. This information is not in the NIST database, network engineers have to research vendor sites such as the Cisco Security Advisory repository to get this level of detail. 

There’s a better way

Monitoring the latest descriptions and automatically checking them against the device configurations in your network is best performed by software — it frees up highly skilled engineers to spend time on proactive strategic initiatives and is far more accurate. For many NOC teams, this capability would be A dream come true, or Like Christmas came early, right?

Well, that is exactly what Forward Enhanced Vulnerability Analysis provides!!

No more manual, tedious, and error-prone hunting for those configs on every single “possibly affected” device, one by one, that would take forever.

Just an always accurate, always updated list of devices that are actually vulnerable! Remediation efforts can be prioritized based on risk severity to ensure effort is directed to keeping the network as safe as possible.The screenshot below shows the Detected based on field. This field indicates that there is an at-risk device in the network that matches the OS version only (OS version match) or is running the impacted OS version and matches the vulnerable configuration (Config match).

Additional resources

Watch this 3 minute video:

Read the use case to learn more about how Forward Enterprise can help limit your CVE exposure. Stay tuned with Forward Networks announcements because some great new innovations about vulnerabilities are...coming soon...