Ask ten companies about the responsibilities of a Vulnerability Management team, and you’ll probably get twelve different answers. That’s because every organization is unique, with different structures, tools, and challenges. Yet, despite these differences, many Vulnerability Management teams fall into the same common traps. Let’s explore these pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Development
Vulnerability Management teams can learn a lot from product teams. Both groups are about building, iterating and improving, but with different goals. Here are some common mistakes I’ve seen and how to approach them differently.
Non risk-based planning and solutions
It’s tempting to try and tackle every problem/vulnerability in a new surface area. But spending too much time trying to find and fix everything can slow progress and delay real impact.
Example: Imagine a team tackling container scanning. The instinct might be to identify every container in use, map out relationships between containers, and scan each one for vulnerabilities. Sounds thorough, right? But in reality, this process often hits unexpected roadblocks and can take forever to provide value.
Key Question:
Where does most of the risk lie in this particular surface area?
In many cases, the highest risk originates from base containers not built by our organization. These containers are foundational, widely used, and often outside our control. Focusing on them can simplify the solution by removing the need to map complex container relationships.
Once the key risk areas are identified, teams can explore complementary solutions to further reduce risk:
- Prevent or monitor the introduction of new base containers
- Reduce the surface area in base containers by using distroless containers or a vendor like Chainguard
This approach mirrors the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) used in product development. By focusing on the highest-risk areas, teams can quickly reduce the threat surface. Later iterations can address residual risks if needed.
Rigid Designs
A rigid pipeline design can create single points of failure, limiting the team’s ability to adapt or recover if a tool or process breaks. Systems that depend on a single scanning tool, API, or vendor-specific solution can become bottlenecks if that tool experiences downtime or becomes obsolete.
Example: Consider a team that creates a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for its libraries. By generating an SBOM in an industry-standard format like SPDX or CycloneDX, the team gains the flexibility to use multiple vulnerability scanning tools interchangeably. If one tool becomes unavailable or unreliable, the SBOM ensures that another tool can pick up the task without disruption. This approach minimizes dependency on a single tool and adds flexibility to the pipeline. Moreover, by adhering to open standards, the team decouples itself from vendor lock-in, ensuring long-term adaptability and integration with emerging tools.
Best Practices:
- Use industry-standard formats to simplify integration with alternative solutions
- Regularly test alternatives to ensure they can be swapped in when needed
- Build redundancy and failover capabilities into critical pipeline components
- Document fallback plans and ensure they’re easily accessible
Flexibility in design not only mitigates risk but also enables innovation and smoother scaling as new tools and processes emerge.
Lack of Monitoring
Automation is only as reliable as the monitoring that supports it. Establishing metrics and automated alerts is essential to ensuring pipeline health and should be prioritized before initiating new projects.
Key questions:
- What is the availability of my pipeline?
- How long does it take to run?
- What behavior is considered normal or anomalous?
The goal is to catch issues early and avoid surprises. Healthy pipelines mean fewer missed vulnerabilities and less firefighting later.
Lack of Metrics
Monitoring keeps things running, but measuring tells you if what you’re doing is actually working.
Example: A team introduces a static code analysis tool to automate vulnerability detection in their codebase. Initially, they focus on whether the tool runs successfully and completes scans. However, they lack insight into its effectiveness.
After introducing key metrics like tracking the number of vulnerabilities detected, false positive rates, and average time to resolution,they gain valuable insights. They discover that while the tool identifies a high volume of vulnerabilities, around 40% are false positives, frustrating product teams and causing delays.
With these insights, the team takes action:
- Fine-tune the static analysis rules to reduce false positives
- Filter out low-severity issues that don’t meet their defined risk threshold
- Establish baseline metrics to track trends and measure improvements over time
As a result, the tool becomes more effective, reporting is clearer, and the product teams trust the findings, leading to faster remediation and a stronger security posture.
Key questions:
- How many vulnerabilities have we uncovered over time?
- Are we seeing more false positives or false negatives?
- How has our detection rate changed over time?
- Are we meeting our SLAs for resolution?
Metrics aren’t just numbers—they tell a story about whether your efforts are paying off. Without them, you’re flying blind.
Lack of Documentation and Knowledge Sharing
We’ve all been there. A problem crops up, and someone says, “Didn’t we fix this last year?” Only to find there’s no record of how or why. Without good documentation, teams repeat mistakes, waste time, and lose valuable insights.
Example: A team repeatedly encounters vulnerabilities in third-party libraries used across multiple applications. However, because previous remediation steps were never documented, developers spend unnecessary time rediscovering the same solutions. Additionally, security engineers waste time re-explaining the risks and mitigations to multiple teams instead of directing them to a well-maintained knowledge base.
Key areas that require documentation:
- Historical Vulnerability Data: Maintain a centralized record of past vulnerabilities, their impact, and how they were mitigated. This helps prevent duplicate work and ensures consistency in risk assessments
- Remediation Playbooks: Provide clear, step-by-step remediation guides for commonly occurring vulnerabilities, reducing the need for manual intervention
- Exception Handling: Document cases where vulnerabilities cannot be immediately patched, including the rationale, temporary mitigations, and an agreed-upon resolution timeline
- Communication and Escalation Paths: Ensure teams know where to report new vulnerabilities and how they should escalate critical findings
More best practices:
- Keep a central repository for documenting pipelines and processes
- Document the reasoning behind key security decisions to provide future context
- Host regular knowledge-sharing sessions to keep everyone informed
Reporting
Missteps in how vulnerabilities are reported can lead to common frustrations among Vulnerability Management teams, such as slow resolution times or “won’t fix” responses.
Surfacing non-actionable or hard to action vulnerabilities
Reporting issues without clear actions or context fosters friction. Such issues are often ignored or delayed beyond SLA timelines, increasing “vulnerability burnout” and eroding trust.
Example: Imagine a vulnerability report that simply states, “High severity vulnerability found in XYZ library.” There’s no indication of where the library is used, its version, or whether it’s in an active production system. The report also doesn’t clarify the potential impact or offer guidance on remediation. As a result, the receiving team is left with several questions:
- Where exactly is this library used?
- Is it exposed to external threats, or is it an internal component?
- What is the immediate action expected of them?
- Without this context, the team must spend time investigating or clarifying the report, delaying the resolution and increasing frustration.
Instead, the report could state: “A high severity vulnerability (CVE-XXXX-YYYY) has been identified in the XYZ library, version 1.2.3, used within the payment service. This library is exposed to external web traffic, and exploitation could lead to unauthorized access. The suggested remediation is to upgrade to version 1.2.5. If this is not possible, consider applying the following compensating controls.”
This version gives immediate clarity, outlines risk, and offers an actionable next step—reducing confusion and enabling faster remediation.
Best practices:
- Provide clear action plans with each reported vulnerability
- Clearly articulate the risk and its organizational impact
- Avoid assuming stakeholders will understand the severity or context of an issue
Poorly prioritized issues
If everything is a priority, then nothing is. Throwing every vulnerability at a team without proper prioritization can be another cause for “vulnerability burnout”.
Example: A Vulnerability Management team identifies multiple vulnerabilities within a product. They send a report listing every issue as “high priority” without considering the actual impact. Some vulnerabilities affect non-production systems with limited exposure, while others involve critical services directly accessible from the internet.
The receiving product team, overwhelmed by the volume and lack of clear prioritization, struggles to know where to start. As a result, critical vulnerabilities remain unaddressed, while time is wasted on low-risk issues. This not only delays risk reduction but also erodes trust between teams.
The team could instead categorize the issues based on risk and urgency:
- Critical: Vulnerabilities impacting exposed production services.
- High: Issues in internal systems that handle sensitive data.
- Low: Vulnerabilities in non-production environments with limited impact.
This way, the product team can focus their efforts where it matters most, reducing risk faster and improving overall efficiency.
Best practices:
- Clearly label high or critical priority vulnerabilities.
- Automate where possible to minimize noise
- Communicate priority rationales transparently
Organization
Effective Vulnerability Management depends on strong collaboration across teams. Clear communication and well-defined processes ensure that security efforts align with organizational goals.
Not being considered a stakeholder
Discovering key changes “too late” is a common challenge. This happens when Vulnerability Management teams are not recognized as stakeholders in new products or changes in existing systems.
Ideas:
- Be proactive. Let teams know where and when you need to be involved
- Create a stakeholder registry to formalize involvement.
- Build relationships with teams that manage critical systems
For example, if you rely on an internal system to track production hosts, you need to be looped in before any API changes. Missing that could mean blind spots in your vulnerability detection.
Lack of Feedback Loops
Many Vulnerability Management teams implement processes but fail to establish effective feedback loops with stakeholders (like development or operations teams). Without feedback, it’s difficult to refine processes or understand real-world challenges.
Best practices:
- Conduct regular retrospectives or feedback sessions with product teams to understand what’s working and what’s not
- Use this feedback to refine vulnerability reporting, prioritize issues better, or improve automation processes
- Establish two-way communication, ensuring that developers feel heard and valued in security processes
Vulnerability Management isn’t just about finding and fixing issues, it’s about building sustainable, proactive processes that evolve with the organization’s needs. The pitfalls outlined in this post are common, but they are also avoidable with the right strategies and mindset. What other pitfalls have you observed in your organization?