Last updated at Tue, 29 Apr 2025 12:30:00 GMT
Co-authored by Peter Whibley, Ed Montgomery, and Joel Alcon
Technology innovation combined with the highly fragmented nature of today's IT landscape means that vulnerabilities are being exploited faster and at greater scale than ever. Security teams contend with a daily surge of new threat actors and attack vectors. Without a unified view of assets, business context, and compensating controls, they waste weeks identifying which risks are truly critical.
Many organizations try to tackle this challenge by implementing exposure management and risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) approaches, where vulnerability data from various tools is consolidated into one dashboard. But many of these tools present risk scores without demonstrating a holistic view of the business impact of vulnerabilities, mitigating controls for endpoints, patch management status, and remediation steps.
Without that end-to-end context, security teams are struggling to keep up with the volume of new vulnerabilities. In fact, once the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) announced in February 2024 that it would no longer provide vulnerability scores for all CVEs, the shortcomings of traditional vulnerability management, including RBVM, became more evident.
From chasing vulnerabilities, to proactively mitigating risk
Rapid7’s Remediation Hub enables security teams to go beyond simply identifying vulnerabilities and focus more on remediating risk. By augmenting vulnerability findings with business context, threat intelligence, and compensating controls, organizations gain a continuous, all-in-one view of how to detect and respond to risks across their enterprise. These new capabilities empower security teams to:
- Assess the impact of remediation steps. Reimagine your attack surface by viewing the number of vulnerabilities addressed by each remediation action.
- Prioritize remediation with confidence. Leverage dynamic, threat-aware risk scores to assess the criticality of issues and quickly go from vulnerability to action.
- Optimize risk mitigation. Accelerate risk response through streamlined remediation workflows.
Third-party vulnerability findings elevate risk remediation
Security teams leverage multiple vulnerability scanning tools for different parts of their infrastructure, including cloud environments, containers, web applications, and endpoints. Each tool reports findings in its own format and utilizes different scoring methods, making it difficult to get a clear, unified picture of an organization’s risk exposure.
By unifying this data into a centralized platform, security teams reduce unnecessary noise caused by redundant vulnerability findings, streamlining triage efforts, reducing silos, and driving faster, more informed remediation efforts.
Rapid7 Remediation Hub delivers this normalized view of third-party vulnerabilities, enabling teams to stop wasting time chasing low-impact issues or overlook high-severity threats. The solution takes this unified lens further via risk scores that combine these vulnerability findings with business context to help security teams quickly identify the most critical vulnerabilities, allocate resources efficiently, and communicate risk more effectively to stakeholders. These capabilities not only boost operational efficiency, but also strengthen an organization's security posture.
Context-based visibility into endpoint protection and patch management
Context is an essential component of managing risk in today’s increasingly complex technology landscape. By solely relying on vulnerability scores without also understanding business impact or breach likelihood, security teams are left with a hazy, incomplete view of their attack surface.
Rapid7 Exposure Command empowers security teams to prioritize vulnerabilities based on attacker behavior, exploitability, and potential impact – all without the need to export data into separate security tools. Rapid7 delivers deep, multi-layered risk scores calculated from Rapid7 Labs’s threat intelligence, first-party scans, third-party vulnerability findings, and an organization’s unique mitigating controls. Furthermore, Remediation Hub is seamlessly integrated with Rapid7 Surface Command, arming security teams with a continuous view of key mitigating controls of assets across the enterprise, including endpoint protection and patch management in place.
- Endpoint protection - Remediation Hub displays which assets have active endpoint protection, as well as the protection type on the asset. Users can use intuitive filters to hone in on critical findings, such as the assets that lack endpoint protection and prioritize remediation efforts via a risk-based approach that gives higher priority to assets that lack endpoint protection.
- Patch management - Remediation Hub shows the patch management availability status of each asset, arming security teams with a view of assets that are available for patching by a patch management system. Users can filter on assets with vulnerabilities where no patching is active.
Faster risk response, fewer security silos
Security teams often operate in silos, with a team handling risk identification and another focused on remediation. CISA recommends that critical vulnerabilities be remediated within 15 calendar days of initial detection, but to achieve this, organizations require tight collaboration between these disparate teams.
Unfortunately, because these groups operate with poorly integrated security tools, going from vulnerability finding to risk remediation can take months, with some vulnerabilities going unpatched for years. For instance, the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report finds that it takes an estimated 55 days to remediate 50% of critical vulnerabilities once their patches are available.
Remediation Hub tackles this challenge with purpose-built SOAR integrations that help improve collaboration and drive down MTTR (mean time to remediate). The new capabilities automatically trigger remediation workflows, with notifications auto-generated and sent to adjacent teams responsible for implementing the recommended remediations.
For example, users can leverage Remediation Hub to automatically trigger a workflow in Jira or create an incident report in ServiceNow based on the severity or business impact of a vulnerability. Each workflow is fully customizable based on unique security thresholds.
Embracing faster, continuous exposure management
Organizations are rapidly transitioning from traditional vulnerability management to more continuous, exposure management approaches. Rapid7’s Remediation Hub – an integral component of the Exposure Command platform – empowers security teams to embrace the shift.
With a remediation-based approach to vulnerability management and risk reduction, organizations are taking command of their attack surface and discovering a simpler, more effective approach to managing and truly mitigating risk.
If you are interested in learning more about Remediation Hub and our Exposure Command platform, check out our Exposure Command product tour.
