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Reporting

Vulnerability management reporting covers the types of reports generated throughout the vulnerability management lifecycle, what they contain, and who receives them. Reports vary in content and format depending on the stage of the process and the audience, from internal stakeholders to external clients and vendors.

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About this video

Reports are a consistent output of the vulnerability management process, generated at various points in the lifecycle to communicate findings, plans, and outcomes to the people who need them. Common triggers for report generation include the completion of a penetration test, the results of a vulnerability scan, the development of a remediation plan, and the verification that identified issues have been resolved. Each of these stages can produce distinct documentation tailored to the context and the recipients involved. The core content of vulnerability management reports typically includes discovered vulnerabilities, the affected systems and hosts, risk scores, prioritization decisions, and the remediation or mitigation actions taken. Reports may also track reoccurrence of known issues and measure organizational security posture against applicable compliance frameworks. When compliance is a factor, reports may need to be shared with customers, auditors, or regulatory bodies to demonstrate that specific legal or contractual obligations are being met. The audience for a given report heavily influences what metrics and data are included. Executive stakeholders such as boards of directors, shareholders, and senior management often look for high-level indicators including key performance indicators, key risk indicators, trend data, and summaries of top risks or newly disclosed critical vulnerabilities and zero-days. Internal committees, the broader organization, and external parties such as clients, partners, and vendors may each require different levels of detail and different framing. Understanding who will receive a report and what decisions they need to make from it is central to producing documentation that is useful and actionable across the vulnerability management program.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Vulnerability Management Reports

Aligned to

CompTIA CySA+
4.1 Explain the importance of vulnerability management reporting and communication.
NIST CSF
ID.RA-05 Threats, vulnerabilities, likelihoods, and impacts are used to understand inherent risk and inform risk response prioritization.
NIST 800-53
RA-5 Vulnerability Monitoring and Scanning
ISC2 CISSP
6.4 Analyze test output and generate report
CompTIA Security+
4.3 Explain various activities associated with vulnerability management.
CompTIA SecurityX
2.6 Explain how threat and vulnerability management techniques are used in the enterprise.

Key terms

Vulnerability
A weakness in a system, application, or process that can be exploited by a threat actor.
Vulnerability Assessment
The process of identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing vulnerabilities in a system.
Penetration Testing
An authorized simulated attack on a system to identify and evaluate security vulnerabilities.
Risk
The potential for loss or harm resulting from a threat exploiting a vulnerability.
Patch Management
The process of acquiring, testing, and installing software updates to fix vulnerabilities and improve functionality.
Zero-Day
A vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor and has no available patch at the time of exploitation.
Compliance Metrics
Quantitative measures used to evaluate how well an organization adheres to regulatory requirements or established security standards.
Risk Score
A calculated value derived from multiplying or combining probability and impact ratings to quantify the overall level of a risk.

Topics

Vulnerability Management Security Reporting Risk Scoring Remediation Compliance Metrics Cybersecurity

Transcript

Throughout this vulnerability management process, we're probably going to generate a few reports, or we're going to get reports from others. What do these reports look like?

Here's the vulnerability management process. Through this process, at any given time we might have to generate a report. There are some common places we do see reports. For instance, we will see a report if we're hiring somebody to do a pen test and then they come back; they're going to give us a report of what they found. Also, if we do a vulnerability scan, the result will be a report, so after our discovery phase we probably have a report. But there also are going to be reports in these other times. We probably want to, after we create a plan, have a report that we can hand off to others. After we verify that we've remediated these issues, there's probably going to be a report that we're going to generate to give to our stakeholders.

What the reports contain

Depending on where we're at in the cycle, we may generate different reports, but some of the information you would find in these reports would be things like the vulnerabilities that were found, the affected hosts that it applies to, the risk score of the vulnerability, any kind of prioritization if you're prioritizing these vulnerabilities, the remediation and mitigation techniques or what you did to remediate them, if there is any kind of reoccurrence of these, or also if I measure it against some sort of compliance.

There are times we have to turn over reports because of compliance, or maybe you have a customer that's asking for a compliance report, how you measure up against the compliance. I certainly encountered this where I had some customers that wanted to know how we were complying with certain laws and regulations, or with what they were requiring.

Metrics and stakeholders

These reports also might include several different types of metrics depending on who they're for. For instance, if they're key stakeholders within the company and they want to know what's happening, they may want to know how it measures against key performance indicators or key risk indicators. Perhaps they're looking for some sort of trend data, so we need to pull some trending reports of how things are going: are they improving, or are risks growing? They might want to know things like the top 10 risks of the company. Maybe they want to know some critical vulnerabilities and zero days that have come out that we're exposed to. Or maybe they're looking for service level objectives, SLOs.

A lot of what we include in the report would be because of the stakeholder: who is the stakeholder, and what are they asking for? And you could get stakeholders throughout all of the company. It could be the shareholders of the company, or the board of directors, or a lot of times I find it's upper management. Maybe there's a committee within the company and you have to deliver the information to them. Or maybe it's the company as a whole.

So there are varying reasons why we generate these reports and who we turn them in to. As one of my examples suggested, I've had to turn them in to clients, but there could be partners or vendors who are asking for the reports, or maybe we're asking for it from certain vendors that are giving us services. So these reports can look pretty varied depending on where we're at in the process and who we're handing them over to, but this is going to be something that we are going to see throughout this process.

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