Why Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) Increases Your Security Debt, and How You Can Fix It

RBVM is crucial for identifying and remediating vulnerabilities that pose the most risk. However, with only 2 out of 10 discovered vulnerabilities getting fixed, this risk-based approach to remediation contributes to your growing security debt.

Join this webinar with Nucleus COO Scott Kuffer to understand the foundational process gap between security teams and remediation teams, and learn how to effectively remediate more vulnerabilities with precise vs. efficient strategies.

Join to learn how to:

• Identify the remediation disconnect: Understand the gap risk-based remediation creates and how it contributes to your growing security debt.
• Become security “product managers”: Learn how to improve the efficiency of your vulnerability management program by aligning your processes to the remediation teams.
• Adopt 2 Remediation Strategies: Learn how to apply precise and efficient remediation strategies effectively. Understand when to use each approach to maximize your risk reduction efforts.

Scott Kuffer: Scott is the co-founder and COO of Nucleus Security, a leading provider of risk-based vulnerability management solutions. With a wealth of experience in cybersecurity, SaaS, and business strategy, he has been at the forefront of driving innovation in vulnerability management, helping the world’s most complex enterprises tackle their biggest security challenges. Before Nucleus, Scott was a cybersecurity engineer in the defense industry.

Understanding Security Debt: A New Perspective on Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

Security debt is a pervasive problem for many organizations trying to maintain control over their vulnerabilities. In this Nucleus webinar, Scott Kuffer, co-founder of Nucleus Security, breaks down the challenges of Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) and provides actionable strategies to reduce security debt through smarter prioritization and more efficient remediation.

Let’s explore the key insights and practical takeaways shared in this session.

What Is Security Debt in Vulnerability Management?

Security debt refers to the accumulation of unaddressed vulnerabilities in an organization’s environment. It’s similar to financial debt: the longer it goes unmanaged, the greater the risk becomes.

Traditional RBVM approaches often exacerbate security debt by focusing primarily on prioritization over remediation, leading to overwhelmed teams and unresolved vulnerabilities.

“When we look at RBVM, it’s all about prioritization now. We’ve effectively simplified it down to prioritizing vulnerabilities, rather than the holistic process it was supposed to be,” explains Scott.

Focusing solely on prioritization without effective remediation results in risk backlog rather than risk reduction.

By treating vulnerabilities as isolated items, organizations risk overwhelming their IT and security teams with never-ending lists of tickets, which leads to inefficiency and burnout.

The real value of RBVM should be to streamline the workflow, allowing teams to focus on impactful remediation.

The “List Effect”: Why Prioritization Alone Fails

Most organizations handle vulnerabilities like a to-do list, with individual vulnerabilities ranked by perceived risk.

The problem with this approach, as Scott describes it, is the “list effect”—an endless cycle where vulnerabilities are assessed one by one, creating more complexity and security debt.

“We’ve turned RBVM into a prioritization scheme, which means we’re effectively managing risk by looking at vulnerabilities one by one. This leads to a disconnect between how VM teams and businesses think about risk,” he notes.

Prioritizing vulnerabilities individually often misaligns with the business’s broader risk management objectives.

While a vulnerability might seem critical in isolation, its true risk depends on factors like asset criticality, exposure, and potential business impact.

Organizations must shift from focusing on isolated vulnerabilities to thinking in terms of grouped vulnerabilities that can be resolved collectively.

This approach minimizes the impact of security debt and aligns vulnerability management (VM) strategies with business objectives.

Embracing Product Management Strategies in Vulnerability Management

Scott introduces a novel approach: treating vulnerability management similarly to product management.

Both involve prioritizing, categorizing, and balancing limited resources to achieve the best outcomes.

By applying product management principles to vulnerability management, teams can create more efficient workflows.

“If we look at vulnerability management as a pipeline rather than a circle, it can operate like a sales funnel or even a software development pipeline. This shift allows teams to balance priorities better and deliver remediation more effectively,” Scott explains.

The analogy to product management highlights a key transformation: rather than treating vulnerabilities as individual problems to fix, organizations can view them as a part of a larger remediation “product” that needs continuous development and optimization.

This approach not only reduces security debt but also aligns VM teams more closely with business outcomes.

By creating “categories” of vulnerabilities—such as expedited (urgent, high-risk) and efficient (routine, lower-risk)—teams can allocate resources more strategically.

The SLA Roadmap: Creating a Maturity Model for SLAs

Scott emphasizes the need for a more nuanced approach to Service-Level Agreements (SLAs), introducing the concept of an SLA Roadmap.

This model allows teams to set more precise SLAs based on vulnerability categories, helping to improve SLA adherence over time.

“Rather than setting blanket SLAs, we should shrink the category of expedited vulnerabilities and get more precise. By implementing an SLA maturity model, teams can compete internally to improve, moving from handling only urgent vulnerabilities to meeting broader, efficiency-based SLAs,” he suggests.

The SLA Roadmap is a tangible tool for evolving vulnerability management maturity.

It encourages teams to go beyond basic SLA adherence, focusing on continual improvement in their processes.

By implementing this maturity model, organizations can ensure that their VM strategies are not only meeting immediate security needs but also supporting long-term risk reduction.

The model also gamifies the process, fostering healthy competition among teams and driving more consistent results.

Automating Vulnerability Management at Scale

Automation is critical for managing vulnerabilities at scale, but it’s often limited to patch management.

Scott stresses the need for automation in other aspects of vulnerability management, such as correlation of findings, routing vulnerabilities to the correct teams, and adjusting priorities based on changing conditions.

“The biggest challenge with vulnerability management isn’t that we don’t know what to do—it’s that we don’t know how to do it at scale. Automation should extend beyond patch management to include aspects like routing and prioritization,” says Scott.

This pushes organizations to rethink how they deploy automation in vulnerability management.

By broadening automation efforts to encompass correlation, routing, and decision-making, VM teams can better manage the immense volume of vulnerabilities.

This expanded use of automation helps reduce the manual workload, accelerates remediation, and, ultimately, cuts down on security debt.

Grouping Vulnerabilities: The Path to More Efficient Remediation

A recurring theme in this webinar is the importance of grouping vulnerabilities for more efficient remediation.

Rather than assigning individual vulnerabilities to teams, Scott advocates for bundling them by remediation actions, such as patching all related vulnerabilities in one go.

“When we start thinking in terms of groups of vulnerabilities instead of individual items, we open up an entire new world of remediation possibilities,” he explains.

Grouping vulnerabilities not only makes the remediation process faster and more manageable but also allows teams to better align with business priorities.

It’s a shift from reactive to proactive vulnerability management, enabling VM teams to achieve a greater reduction in security debt.

Grouping also helps create clearer, more actionable workflows that simplify communication with business stakeholders.

Takeaway: Think Like a Business, Act Like a CISO

VM teams need to think more like business decision-makers.

Security teams often have delegated authority to make risk decisions, but these decisions need to be framed in a way that resonates with business outcomes.

“We are essentially business decision-makers at a lower level of technicality. To be effective, we need to think like the business, understand broader impacts, and communicate that to leadership,” Scott emphasizes.

This is a reminder that vulnerability management is not just about security; it’s about business resilience.

By framing vulnerability data in terms of business impact—such as cost reduction, operational efficiency, or improved customer trust—VM teams can secure better buy-in from business leaders and ensure that security initiatives are seen as integral to business success.