The Importance of Vulnerability Prioritization

The number of vulnerabilities is only increasing. In the past five years, the number of reported vulnerabilities of all severities has increased more than 126% according to the National Vulnerability Database, as more vulnerabilities get added to the task lists of teams every day. Given the scale of reported vulnerabilities, security teams can’t patch every single identified issue in a timely manner. Instead, they have to figure out which vulnerabilities are the riskiest. We’re putting vulnerability prioritization in context and expanding on best practices to tame the alert list — without creating an equally burdensome prioritization strategy.

What is Vulnerability Prioritization?

In simple terms, vulnerability prioritization is the practice of resolving vulnerabilities based on the potential risks they pose to the organization and its specific environment, starting with the most critical vulnerabilities first. In this case, vulnerabilities include the coding weaknesses that can threaten applications and systems — including misconfigurations, bugs, design flaws, outdated software, or weak default authentication.

Traditional vulnerability management has focused on severity as the primary measure for which vulnerability to resolve first. However, that quickly became untenable for all but the most well-resourced security teams, especially given that there have been 39,137 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) of all severities reported to the National Vulnerability Database in 2024 (as of December 19). Within that group, 2,348 vulnerabilities were scored as “Critical” — the highest ranking. 

Ideally, teams could resolve all Critical vulnerabilities first, then move to less critical weaknesses in their systems. But in reality, it takes an average of 60 to 150 days to resolve each identified vulnerability. That includes identifying impacted systems, testing the patch for potential issues, and deploying it throughout the infrastructure. This process comes with verifications, checks, and documentation that all take time and attention.

Vulnerability prioritization changes that narrative. When security teams focus on vulnerability prioritization, they analyze the identified vulnerability based on their specific technical context, which can include the following:

• Severity (Often from the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, or CVSS, score)
• Exploitability
• Asset Criticality
• Threat Context
• Impact on Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA)
• Exposure
• Patch Availability
• Compliance Requirements
• Resource Availability
• Chaining Potential
• User interaction Requirement
• False Positive Likelihood
• Operational Impact of Mitigation
• Recency and Awareness

Here’s an example: if an exploited vulnerability would have a limited impact on systems, it gets a lower priority for remediation than another vulnerability, despite it carrying a lower severity rating. 

Ultimately, the goal is to reduce the risk of a breach or other security incident in a far more efficient way than traditional vulnerability management can. But hacking through prioritization weights and measures can be just as thorny as pages and pages of undifferentiated alerts. In the end, prioritization needs automation and a smarter workflow that surfaces only the most critical items to teams who can confidently tackle them, knowing their work is actually making digital assets more secure.

Common Vulnerability Prioritization Challenges

In a world of ever increasing vulnerabilities, most organizations claim only middling visibility into the vulnerabilities lurking in their ecosystems.

51% of organizations say they have a moderate level of visibility into their vulnerabilities.

Getting more visibility doesn’t make the task of securing vulnerabilities easier; in fact, it just increases the number of vulnerabilities teams will have to contend with. With so many different ways to prioritize vulnerabilities, it’s no wonder organizations might revert to CVSS scores or ad-hoc ways to trim their alerts.

For many organizations without an automated and comprehensive way to incorporate vulnerability prioritization factors into their pipelines, visibility is just the beginning of the journey. They’ll also need to surmount organizational challenges that prevent effective prioritization. 

These include: 

Volume Management 

Scanning network and cloud infrastructure to identify all potential vulnerabilities can result in hundreds of thousands of identified issues for technical teams to triage and prioritize. 

For example, a cloud infrastructure scan in a mid-sized organization can easily identify over 10,000 vulnerabilities. Triaging vulnerabilities is the next step. Teams might trim the noise by filtering for vulnerabilities exploitable over the internet and tied to known threat actor campaigns, narrowing the list to 200 actionable items.

Resource Constraints 

There are only so many technical professionals in an organization who can resolve many vulnerabilities. From a staffing perspective alone, patching even the highest-priority issues can be challenging, never minding the lower-priority vulnerabilities that do not need to be resolved or mitigated immediately. 

For instance, a small team might struggle to patch vulnerabilities across endpoints. They could implement an orchestration tool to deploy patches in batches across systems, working within capacity. But they will still find a limit to the number of vulnerabilities they can address.

Technical Complexity 

Depending on the system, patching a vulnerability may require a technically complex resolution. That slows remediation and leaves the organization open to attack. 

Does the team risk a service disruption by using a patch that requires an older, independent library? It can be a tough call. If possible, the team may conduct a test deployment in a staging environment and isolate the library dependency, making sure that the patch resolves the vulnerability without affecting operations.

Business Alignment 

Occasionally, a vulnerability might be a higher priority because it’s in a business-critical system that cannot be taken offline. 

If there’s a critical vulnerability in software controlling a production line, does the team shut down the line to patch the issue? They’ll need to decide or employ temporary measures until a permanent fix can be made.

Time Pressure

If threat actors actively use a specific software or hardware vulnerability in an attack campaign, security teams may find a vulnerability that would have otherwise been a lower priority suddenly leaps to the top of their to-do list. 

If a team learns there’s a new exploit in a zero-day vulnerability impacting their systems, they may need to act fast to isolate systems and fix the vulnerability, pausing all other vulnerability fixes until the active threat is resolved.

While visibility into vulnerabilities is a first step, it’s not a solution. Without effective prioritization, teams are left sifting through mountains of data. They must still discern which vulnerabilities demand immediate attention and which pose minimal risk. The complexity of balancing business needs, resource constraints, technical challenges, and evolving threats often leads organizations to fall back on rudimentary approaches like CVSS scores or reactive triage.

But that leaves significant security gaps. To bridge these gaps, some organizations adopt structured frameworks that incorporate contextual, real-time, and risk-based factors into their prioritization strategies. 

Essential Prioritization Frameworks to Follow

While CVSS scores provide a foundational basis for teams that can’t prioritize vulnerabilities against their own environments and risks, they don’t represent the only vulnerability scoring model around. 

The following frameworks offer other ways to refine vulnerability prioritization. Whether focusing on real-time threats, industry-specific risks, or probabilistic predictions, they nevertheless highlight the importance of tailoring prioritization to fit technical realities and business needs.

Framework	What Is It	How to Use It for Prioritization	Limitations
The Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) database	The CVE database is a core resource where software vulnerabilities are reported. Vulnerabilities in the database are given severity scores of 1 to 10.	CVEs that are scored as Critical should be prioritized.	Ignores technical context. For example, technical safeguards can limit the potential impact of critical vulnerabilities. Others are very difficult to exploit in an attack chain.
Context-Aware Vulnerability Prioritization (CAVP)	A theoretical model that includes technical context and the temporal aspect of CVEs to show change over time.	Applying context to vulnerability prioritization can illuminate which CVEs have the most potential impact on systems.	Not used widely in vulnerability management solutions.
The Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog from CISA	The KEV catalog is a listing of vulnerabilities that are known to be used in attack chains.	The KEV catalog can inform prioritization based on active threat actor campaigns against specific industries or technologies.	The KEV catalog is reactive, only receiving updates when a new threat actor campaign is identified. It’s not useful for forward-looking vulnerability prioritization.
Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)	Designed by FIRST, the EPSS estimates the likelihood that a given vulnerability will be exploited over the next thirty days.	CVEs with a higher score in the EPSS should be resolved sooner because they are more likely to be exploited within the next 30 days.	EPSS is only a probabilistic system. Its findings should only be weighed against other controls in the environment.
Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC)	Created by Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and CISA in 2019 as a vulnerability analysis methodology that accounts for exploitation status, impacts to safety, and prevalence of the affected product in a singular system.	It allows teams to decide whether to act on a vulnerability based on specific contexts and input from senior leaders.	SSVC requires input from senior leadership at increasing levels of vulnerability. It may slow down the process of resolving vulnerabilities given its focus on internal communication.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework	The NIST CSF is a risk management framework informs a risk-based vulnerability prioritization strategy.	The NIST CSF can be used to provide a risk-based view of cybersecurity, allowing teams to consider their actions in terms of reducing overall risk.	The NIST CSF is an overall cybersecurity framework, not one specific to vulnerability management.

Building Effective Prioritization Strategies

Prioritizing vulnerabilities effectively is a challenge, even for mature organizations. But it’s most overwhelming for those without access to automated solutions as their process often relies on manual triage or piecing together multiple tools. It’s an approach that can work but may also leave teams overwhelmed or exposed to avoidable risks.

For organizations not yet leveraging an automated risk prioritization solution, there are still actionable steps teams can take to prioritize better.

1. Start by Narrowing the Funnel

Even without advanced tools, cut down the noise by applying basic filters:

• Exploitability: Focus on vulnerabilities with publicly available exploits. Threat intelligence feeds or resources like the KEV catalog can help.
• Severity: Use CVSS scores as a starting point, prioritizing vulnerabilities marked as Critical or High.
• Exposure: Emphasize internet-facing systems or business-critical applications that could cause the most damage if compromised.

2. Incorporate Contextual Risk Analysis

Manual prioritization can miss important context. If automation isn’t an option, build processes to add context:

• Work with stakeholders to assess how vulnerabilities impact critical business operations.
• Track how often vulnerabilities are targeted in your industry using freely available threat reports or advisories.

3. Focus on Quick Wins

You can make progress even with limited resources:

• Address “low-hanging fruit” like unpatched systems where fixes are readily available.
• Deprioritize vulnerabilities that are unlikely to be exploited due to mitigating controls, like network segmentation or runtime security tools, even if they score high in severity.

4. Establish Continuous Review Processes

Vulnerability prioritization isn’t a one-and-done activity:

• Regularly rescan your environment to validate that resolved vulnerabilities remain patched and no new critical risks have emerged.
• Use dashboards or spreadsheets to track progress and ensure vulnerabilities aren’t overlooked.

Optimize Vulnerability Prioritization with Upwind

Upwind streamlines the identification of vulnerabilities across multi-cloud and multi-architecture environments, helping security teams prioritize and remediate the vulnerabilities that pose the biggest risks to their organizations. With runtime intelligence to precisely identify critical risks, security teams focus on what’s important.

To find out more about Upwind’s vulnerability management and prioritization, book a demo today. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What role does threat intelligence play in prioritization?

Threat intelligence is actionable information about real-world threats to inform cybersecurity decisions and defenses. 

It adds critical context to vulnerability prioritization by focusing on real-world risks and helps organizations move beyond static severity scores to a dynamic, threat-driven approach that’s accurate and adaptive. The approach focuses on: 

• Active Exploits: Highlights vulnerabilities currently exploited in the wild, like those in the CISA KEV catalog.
• Likelihood of Exploitation: Tools like EPSS predict the probability of a vulnerability being exploited soon.
• Industry-Specific Risks: Identifies vulnerabilities frequently targeted in various sectors.
• Attacker Tactics: Aligns prioritization with known threat actor techniques and behaviors.
• Asset Criticality: Focuses on vulnerabilities in high-value, internet-facing, or sensitive systems.
• Regional or Temporal Context: Flags vulnerabilities tied to region-specific or time-sensitive campaigns.

All in all, threat intelligence helps organizations allocate their resources better, addressing vulnerabilities that pose the most immediate risks.

How often should prioritization criteria be reviewed?

Vulnerability prioritization criteria should be reviewed at least quarterly in an ideal world. More frequent prioritization realignments are common and are advised when the environment changes significantly. For example, organizations should reconsider their priorities when: 

• They deploy new systems
• They discover critical vulnerabilities
• They have experienced a major incident
• They have adopted a new framework
• There are moderate to major organizational changes, like mergers, new system deployments and integrations, entrance to new markets, etc.

Ideally, vulnerability prioritization should be an ongoing process with regular reviews to adapt to evolving threats and system updates.

What metrics matter most in vulnerability prioritization?

Effective vulnerability prioritization relies on metrics that provide actionable insights about risks. Here are some primary metrics to help teams focus on vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited and cause significant harm.

• Exploitability: The presence of active exploits or the likelihood of exploitation, like EPSS scores.
• Severity: CVSS scores indicating the potential impact of a vulnerability on systems and data.
• Asset Criticality: The importance of the affected system or application to business operations.
• Exposure: Whether the vulnerability exists in internet-facing or publicly accessible assets.
• Active Threat Context: Real-time intelligence about vulnerabilities targeted in active campaigns (e.g., KEV catalog).
• Patch Availability: Whether a fix is available and the complexity of deploying it.
• Business Impact: The potential consequences of exploitation.
• Mitigating Controls: The presence of internal protective safeguards reducing a vulnerability’s risk or exploitability.