Vulnerability monitoring involves, first, knowing exactly what computing assets you have including their configuration details and, second, knowing what vulnerabilities are associated with those asset configurations, how they work, how difficult they are to exploit, and what damage a successful exploit can do. Only with this information—and only if it is of good quality—can you then effectively assess the risk of the vulnerabilities, decide on what mitigation actions to take on what assets, and finally execute the actions.

Of those vulnerability management elements, monitoring and assessment are often the most challenging to execute particularly with a large number of assets. Plus, because they produce the data upon which mitigation decisions are made, they must be done right. The old adage, “good data in, good data out”, holds very true in vulnerability management. If you do not have an accurate asset database including an accurate software inventory for those assets, you cannot make sound mitigation decisions and your vulnerability management effort would be ineffective leaving you unaware of vulnerabilities, at best, or compromised, at worst.

ASM Vulnerability Monitoring combines the power of ASM asset management with the accuracy and completeness of NIST’s vulnerability database. This feature reports a current list of the potential Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) associated with your asset software inventory and provides information on patches available for these vulnerabilities. It then documents those vulnerabilities and the related assets, applications, and operating systems for decision-making, patching, and audit purposes.