If your organization needs a compelling reason for establishing or enhancing its vulnerability management program, circle this date in bold, red ink on your corporate calendar: May 25, 2018.

On that day, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect, intensifying the need for organizations to painstakingly protect EU residents’ data from accidental mishandling and foul play.

While complying with GDPR involves adopting and modifying a variety of IT systems and business processes, having comprehensive and effective vulnerability management should be key in your efforts.

Why? Too many preventable data breaches occur because hackers exploit well-known vulnerabilities for which patches are available but haven’t been installed.

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In our second installment of the Qualys Top 10 Tips for a Secure & Compliant 2017 blog series, we tackle the bane of many InfoSec teams: Deciding which vulnerabilities to remediate first.

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Vulnerabilities can be serious threats. Once found, system administrators try everything to restore security, such as patching and mitigating. Patching is always the first choice since it’s normally the definitive way to resolve the vulnerability. However, system administrators will sometimes need to mitigate, especially in two cases:

Case 1. A patch has not been released by the vendor.
Case 2. Patching the vulnerability isn’t a high priority in the customer’s environment but still needs to be addressed.

Many vulnerabilities can be mitigated by changing a specific configuration setting in the OS or application. In this blog post, I use HTTPoxy as an example of how Qualys Policy Compliance can play an important role in this type of mitigation by identifying and reporting on all your systems that don’t have the desired configuration.

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