Vulnerability Management
The full process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities across an asset inventory. Effective vulnerability management in IoT/OT requires asset context beyond what scanners provide.
What is Vulnerability Management?
The full process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities across an asset inventory. Effective vulnerability management in IoT/OT requires asset context beyond what scanners provide.
Vulnerability management is the ongoing process of identifying, classifying, prioritizing, and remediating security weaknesses across an organization's asset fleet. It has traditionally been a well-understood IT practice — scan endpoints, receive a CVE list, patch in priority order. In environments with IoT, OT, and IoMT devices, almost every assumption underlying that workflow breaks down.
The fundamental challenge is scale and patchability. A mid-sized enterprise may have hundreds of thousands of open CVEs across its connected devices. The vast majority are not immediately exploitable, but without a prioritization framework, teams either work through them chronologically (ineffective) or by raw CVSS score (also ineffective, since CVSS doesn't account for exploitability or network exposure). Neither approach matches remediation effort to actual risk.
A bigger challenge in IoT and OT: most devices cannot be patched on standard IT cycles. Medical devices require FDA-validated firmware updates. Industrial controllers require downtime windows that may be months away. Legacy OT systems run operating systems that no longer receive patches at all. Effective vulnerability management in these environments must include compensating controls — segmentation, monitoring, access restriction — as legitimate alternatives to patching.
Key Facts
- Less than 2% of published CVEs are actively exploited in the wild — but they account for the majority of breaches
- EPSS + KEV-based prioritization can reduce vulnerability backlog by up to 87% versus CVSS-only approaches
- Over 70% of IoT and medical devices cannot be patched on a standard IT patching schedule
- Mean time to patch in OT environments is 6–18 months due to validation and change control requirements
How ORDR Addresses Vulnerability Management
ORDR delivers risk-prioritized vulnerability management by combining CVE data with KEV status, EPSS scoring, network exposure, device criticality, and asset classification. For devices that cannot be patched, ORDR recommends and automates compensating controls: segmentation policies, enhanced monitoring, and access restrictions that reduce risk without requiring a device update.
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