Preventative beats reactive: Modern risk management for infrastructure vulnerabilities

We know that identifying and patching vulnerabilities is crucial to the overall infrastructure security strategy. However, organizations often overlook the various places where vulnerabilities reside. One of which is the building blocks of modern infrastructure: system images. Images (such as AMIs for Amazon EC2, virtual machines, Docker containers, and more) lay the foundation for infrastructure, and most would be surprised to hear that upwards of 87% of container images in production have been found to possess critical vulnerabilities, with the average age of a vulnerability being 277 days.

This post will explain why organizations must modernize their image practices to meet the security demands of cloud environments. A key part of this process is vulnerability and patch management, i.e. the mitigation, identification, and prioritization of vulnerabilities and the operational process of removing them. Without proper tooling and processes, vulnerability and patch processes can become increasingly complex and tedious. Legacy workflows are insufficient for keeping up with the quantity of changes organizations face when scaling their cloud footprints...

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