Tenable Blog

Vulnerability exploits have been in headlines around the world in recent months for being a leading source of cyber risk. As a result, your organization’s leadership may have started  to ask whether your network is vulnerable to exploitation. The answer to that question often lies in the relationship between vulnerability and exploitability. All exploitable vulnerabilities are, of course, vulnerabilities. But when a vulnerability isn’t “exploitable,” what does that mean?

While we see Gartner’s 2017 information security spending forecast setting the industry abuzz with prospects of seemingly unstoppable growth – reaching $86.4 billion this year and topping the magical $100 billion mark in 2019 [1] – let’s look beyond the numbers to see what a pragmatic security leader can learn from it.

Cybersecurity is a major global economic force, with spending estimated to reach more than $100 billion by 2018, and more than $170 billion by 2020. North America has the largest cybersecurity market in the world, and the United States accounts for the biggest portion, making the industry an important source of well-paying, high-value jobs.

Having a background as a system administrator, I know first-hand many of the challenges you face. As every organization has a unique set of business requirements, system administrators work hard behind the scenes to keep operations running smoothly. From managing permission changes, recovering important files and monitoring user accounts, many system administrators utilize scripts to automate and manage routine tasks. Tenable.io includes over 450 pre-built audit policies and allows you to incorporate custom audit files.

Community ecosystems with vibrant member support have been the catalyst for faster innovation and shorter software development lifecycles in DevOps. Whether it is downloading code or contributing back to the community, organizations today rely heavily on open source software to drive their business. In fact, modern application development is more about assembling existing packages than writing new code. Developing new code takes time, and in the high-velocity world of DevOps it’s much easier and faster to download open source software and frameworks to get up and running quickly.