Introduction

Risk elimination is the goal of any vulnerability management program. It is typically achieved through a combination of patching and scripting solutions. SecOps teams usually prioritize vulnerabilities and forward them to IT teams for remediation. However, the real challenge lies in deciding what to fix first and mapping the right patches or identifying vendor-provided fixes when patches are not yet available or can’t be deployed due to operational risk.

The Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR) depends heavily on the time spent prioritizing vulnerabilities, mapping the right patches, deploying them, or researching appropriate fixes when patches are unreliable or unavailable.

This is where our risk elimination agent, Agent Sara, powered by Agentic AI in Qualys Enterprise TruRisk™ Management (ETM), makes a difference. Agent Sara takes user questions, transforms them into enriched, prioritized insights, and drives the next logical action, reducing delays and uncertainty.

Instead of manually creating queries (QQLs) for prioritization and action mapping, Agent Sara delivers clarity in seconds, resulting in a significant reduction in MTTR and faster remediation cycles.

How Agent Sara Works

Agent Sara is designed to remediate or mitigate vulnerabilities using multiple risk elimination strategies, with the ultimate goal of reducing risk across the enterprise. You simply ask a question, and Sara interprets it, executes the relevant Vulnerability Management, Detection & Response (VMDR) and TruRisk Eliminate queries, and delivers contextual, actionable insights.

Agent Sara’s Role in Tuesday Patching

Let’s see Agent Sara in action with real-world SecOps and remediation use cases, demonstrating how it enables faster, smarter risk reduction.

Consider the scenario of Tuesday Patching, when Microsoft releases security updates on the second Tuesday of each month (Patch Tuesday).

A SecOps analyst can ask:

“Which Microsoft vulnerabilities disclosed in the Sept 2025 Patch Tuesday have public exploits, show active weaponization, or are linked to a ransomware campaign?”

Agent Sara instantly analyzes the associated vulnerabilities and provides insights such as:

• 56K overall vulnerabilities
• 18% have public exploits available
• 12% are linked to ransomware

TruRisk™ from these vulnerabilities: 860

Once the prioritized vulnerabilities are sent to IT teams for remediation the IT person can then ask:

“How many of these vulnerabilities are patchable?”

The question can further be narrowed down to a specific scope of assets. For example:

“Sara, please share the list of patches I should deploy to remediate these vulnerabilities, prioritizing assets owned by the HR, Finance, and Business Apps Teams.”

Agent Sara quickly identifies the patchable vulnerabilities and provides the relevant patches instantly. Once the patch information is clear, patch deployment can start.

When Patches Aren’t Available, MTTR Rises

On Patch Tuesday, Microsoft releases security updates for many vulnerabilities, but not all of them have patches immediately available. These vulnerabilities contribute to the tail of risks that attackers are most likely to exploit.

When a patch is not available, IT teams must invest time researching and developing custom fixes and validating them for safe deployment. This often leads to increased MTTR and delayed patch SLAs.

Now, imagine removing this overhead by asking a simple question:

“Hey Sara, how many of these vulnerabilities have no patch available, and could you point me to the available fixes provided by TruRisk Eliminate?

Sara instantly provides out-of-the-box permanent fixes for such vulnerabilities. Just think about the time saved and the significant reduction in MTTR this enables.

You can also go very specific by asking a question such as:

“Suggest a mitigation for CVE-2013-2900 WinVerifyTrust Signature Validation Vulnerability.”

This is a legacy vulnerability with persistent risk that allows attackers to bypass digital signature validation, potentially leading to unauthorized code execution. Agent Sara lists the exact mitigation within seconds. This saves the time spent on researching, creating, and testing remediation scripts, as Qualys provides them out of the box and Agent Sara points directly to the right one.

Conclusion

Agentic AI not only delivers accurate insights but also drives faster risk elimination with actionable remediation plans, significantly reducing MTTR and transforming how remediation teams operate.

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Find out more about Agentic AI on the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Management platform.  

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