Before
Each morning, a security engineer would check the exploited-vulnerability catalog, research each CVE and vendor advisory, search the CMDB, and compare versions, exposure, and criticality manually. The engineer would then coordinate threat hunting and remediation decisions across separate systems before preparing an executive summary for the CISO.
How it works
- The workflow collects recent actively exploited vulnerabilities, researches authoritative vulnerability and vendor information, and structures the affected versions, mitigations, and indicators.
- It matches each vulnerability to CMDB assets, excludes fixed or unaffected versions, scores real exposures by internet reachability and business criticality, and hunts for exploitation evidence.
- It selects investigation, approved containment, or patch scheduling, creates the corresponding operational record, and summarizes the handled work for the CISO.
Workflow details
- Daily intake: Every morning, the workflow reads the CISA catalog of actively exploited vulnerabilities and keeps entries added within the last 14 days for individual processing.
- Evidence and research: For each vulnerability, it retrieves the official CVE record and the linked vendor advisory, then extracts affected and fixed versions, remediation details, workarounds, exploitation context, and indicators of compromise.
- Exposure qualification: The workflow searches the CMDB for servers associated with the affected vendor and compares installed versions against the affected and fixed ranges. It removes assets that are already safe and prioritizes remaining exposures as P1 or P2 based on internet exposure and business criticality, with patch targets of 7 or 30 days.
- Response orchestration: For each confirmed exposure, it hunts recent security telemetry for vendor indicators and exploitation behavior. Evidence of compromise creates a security incident for investigation; an internet-facing asset without compromise requires owner approval before temporary firewall mitigation and an emergency patch change; other cases receive a scheduled patch change.
- Executive handoff: After processing the exposure decisions, the workflow composes a short factual summary covering new vulnerabilities, dismissed assets, investigations, containment, scheduled patches, and any decision needed, then posts it to the CISO's security channel.
What changed
Vulnerability triage now runs on a daily schedule from threat intake through asset qualification and response selection. Automated checks determine whether an asset is genuinely exposed and whether exploitation evidence exists, while owner approval remains required before temporary containment is applied; the CISO receives a briefing on handled exposures instead of a raw list of tickets.
Work removed
Manually checking the CISA catalog, retrieving CVE and vendor-advisory details, searching the CMDB, comparing installed and fixed versions, filtering patched assets, hunting for indicators, creating incident or change records, and writing the daily CISO summary.
Expected outcome
Based on the workflow's stated estimate, the process could remove approximately 30–60 minutes of analyst work per vulnerability cycle, with consistent triage and response routing for each newly processed exploited vulnerability.
