Vulnerability Management Cheat Sheet

Vulnerability management is the continuous process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, remediating, and monitoring security weaknesses across an organization's IT infrastructure, applications, and cloud environments. This discipline sits at the intersection of security operations, risk management, and compliance, serving as a critical defense against exploitation by threat actors. While traditional approaches relied on static CVE databases and basic CVSS scoring, modern vulnerability management now integrates real-world threat intelligence, exploitability predictions (EPSS), and contextual risk scoring to cut through the noise of 50,000+ CVEs published annually. The key mental model: not all vulnerabilities are equal—prioritization based on actual exploitability, asset criticality, and business impact determines success, not just patching everything with a high CVSS score.