There’s nothing new about the challenges facing vulnerability management teams.
Too many low-quality findings. Prioritisation problems. More noise than signal.
It’s near enough the same set of challenges they’ve faced for over a decade. In fact, the only real difference is that today those challenges are… worse.
Security teams are being challenged from both directions:
- AI-powered vulnerability discovery tools have fuelled an unprecedented surge in disclosed CVEs. This will likely get even worse with frontier models like Mythos
- Rapidly expanding attack surfaces mean teams must find and resolve security issues in increasingly large and diverse IT environments
To make matters worse, cyber budgets are not keeping pace with this growing threat exposure. Consequently, security teams are often expected to do “more with less”, especially when it comes to vulnerability management, where the discrepancy between security and IT resources is felt keenly.
Overcoming alert fatigue
So, security teams are already drowning in alerts and the problem will only get worse as attack surfaces continue to expand. How can they possibly keep vulnerability risk under control?
Simply, security teams need to cut down findings to only those that are valid, relevant and prioritised. For every new finding, teams need to instantly know the answer to:
"Is this vulnerability exploitable in MY environment?"
Answering this requires two elements:
- Accurate attack surface mapping. Knowing precisely which assets, services and technologies are exposed on their ever-expanding perimeter
- Validation of exploitability. Cutting out purely theoretical vulnerabilities to identify those that could be exploited within the context of your environment to cause real harm.
These elements are integral to the YesWeHack platform. In the next section, we’ll use our Continuous Pentesting solution to demonstrate how we help security teams eliminate noise and focus on real, exploitable issues.
Uncovering dangerous vulnerabilities with ZERO noise
Continuous Pentesting combines attack surface discovery, targeted security checkpoints and expert human validation to uncover dangerous vulnerabilities while ensuring a 0% noise rate.
This is done in six steps, with practically no effort on your part.
Step 1: Understand what you have
Here, you specify the domains, IP addresses and IP ranges that make up the backbone of your externally-facing environment. You can also assign a business value (based on criticality) to each asset (or asset group) to aid with prioritisation.
Next, our solution automatically maps your attack surface in real-time. This includes:
- All subdomains and other domains related to your primary assets
- Open services for each domain (eg IPs, protocols, ports, etc)
- Technology components and versions
Note: without these components, full validation of discovered vulnerabilities is impossible. You must know what you have before you can know whether a security issue or CVE affects it.
Step 2: Find exploitable vulnerabilities
How do you find only genuine, exploitable vulnerabilities?
Security Check is a proprietary library of autonomous tests, or ‘checkpoints’, that run continuously against your attack surface to detect exploitable vulnerabilities.
These checkpoints target the most actively exploited issues in the wild – typically emerging CVEs, misconfigurations, and subdomain takeovers. Each is hand selected by our in-house experts, who all have years of experience working on hunters’ Bug Bounty reports, putting them at the cutting edge of vulnerability discovery. They use a range of internal and external sources to identify the most dangerous issues of the moment and build checkpoints around them.
Every checkpoint is based on a full, documented scenario that mimics a real-world attack from reconnaissance through to initial access simulation, without executing weaponised exploits or performing post-compromise actions.
Checkpoints run autonomously, frequently and with very lightweight payloads, ensuring zero stress on your assets and infrastructure. All testing is non-intrusive, controlled and designed to safely confirm real risk while preserving the integrity of your systems and data.
Once Security Check identifies a vulnerability in your attack surface, it automatically validates whether the issue is actually exploitable in your environment.
Step 3: Prioritise based on real-world risk
Prioritisation is crucial. Remediating vulnerabilities can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, so security teams need to be certain they are focused on the most dangerous issues.
To address this, YesWeHack’s Continuous Pentesting solution automatically risk assesses every finding and prioritises based on:
- Severity, based on CVSS
- Exploitability, using EPSS and other exploitability scores to determine the likelihood it will be abused in the wild
- Asset value, as defined by your team in step one
Step 4: Expert human confirmation
At this point, we have findings that have been automatically validated and prioritised. However, automation only gets you so far. Fundamentally, there is no replacement for expert human intervention.
Our in-house team of triagers are experts at reviewing and reproducing issues, adding crucial information and context to reports, and accurately assessing the significance of each finding.
For every issue uncovered by Security Check, our team:
- Reviews the issue and risk score, ensuring the report is complete and accurate
- Reproduces the issue, to validate that it is exploitable in your environment
- Reassesses the risk score to ensure it accurately reflects the issue’s potential real-world impact
- Conducts further checks to ensure the issue is unique and not already reported
It’s this human validation stage that ensures Continuous Pentesting customers receive only confirmed, exploitable vulnerability reports with ZERO noise. Consequently, they can continuously validate their attack surface against the most dangerous visibility without wasting any time, energy or resources on findings that don’t matter.
Step 5: Check that the fix worked
Of course, all the above is for naught if the patch (or other remediation) used to address an issue doesn’t actually… fix it. And, as every security team knows, this does happen from time to time.
To make sure it doesn’t happen to you, our team conducts a full post-remediation fix check for every issue reported. Simply mark the issue as fixed in YesWeHack platform and our team will complete the fix check.
Find exploitable vulnerabilities in your attack surface
If your security team is feeling the squeeze of increased demands and limited time, Continuous Pentesting can help.
By uncovering exploitable, high-risk vulnerabilities with zero noise, our solution safeguards your organisation against genuine threats while minimising the strain on your team.
Contact YesWeHack for a no-obligation live demo and review of your testing needs.
