Vulnerability Response integrations

Release version: Washingtondc

Updated February 6, 2024

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Summary of Vulnerability Response Integrations

Vulnerability Response supports third-party integrations, allowing for the reconciliation of imported vulnerabilities from sources like the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and external scanners with assets in your CMDB. This process creates vulnerable items, which are organized into remediation tasks, risk-scored, prioritized, and assigned to relevant teams. Note that different third-party integrations do not share deduplication for vulnerable items.

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Key Features

Third-party Integrations: Integrate with various vulnerability detection tools (e.g., Rapid7, Qualys, Tenable). Each integration operates independently without deduplication of vulnerable items across different tools.
Microsoft Security Response Center Integration: Available for managing vulnerability responses, with configuration options through the Setup Assistant.
Custom Integrations: Ability to create manual integrations for tools not available in the ServiceNow Store.
Data Processing and Management: Integration processes generate multiple entries that must be processed within an hour, with heartbeats indicating active processing. Timeout errors are managed to ensure data continues processing.

Key Outcomes

By implementing these integrations, ServiceNow customers can enhance their vulnerability management processes, improve asset risk assessment, and streamline remediation efforts. Understanding and configuring these integrations effectively will lead to better security posture and operational efficiency.

Vulnerability Response includes support for third-party integrations. Included in this section are some basic guidelines for developing your own integrations.

Third-party integrations

Imported vulnerabilities from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and detection data from third-party scanners are reconciled with the assets in your CMDB. When an imported vulnerability matches an existing asset, a vulnerable item is created. Vulnerable items are grouped automatically into tasks for remediation, risk-scored with business context, prioritized and assigned to appropriate teams for remediation.

Note:

Third-party integrations are treated separately. If more than one third-party integration application is in use in your environment there is no vulnerable item (VI) deduplication across integrations. For example, VI deduplication between Rapid7 and Qualys is not available.

However, mismatches in detection count between a third-party scanner (for example, Qualys) to VIs in your ServiceNow instance are expected, since we dedupe across IPs, ports and so on.

For information about third-party integrations supported by Application Vulnerability Response see, Integrating Application Vulnerability Response with other applications

CISA Known Exploit Vulnerability (KEV) Integration
Understanding the Microsoft Threat and Vulnerability Management Vulnerability integration
Understanding the HCL BigFix patch orchestration integration with Vulnerability Response
Understanding the Vulnerability Response patch orchestration integration with Microsoft SCCM
Understanding the NVD integrations
Qualys Vulnerability Integration
Understanding the Rapid7 Vulnerability Integration
Shodan Exploit Integration
Understanding the Tenable Vulnerability Integration
Microsoft Security Response Center Solution Integration
The Microsoft Security Response Center Solution Integration is available with Vulnerability Solution Management. For information on the installation and configuration of the Microsoft Security Response Center Solution Integration and the Red Hat Solution Integration, see Install the Solution Management for Vulnerability Response application. You can configure, edit, schedule, and launch on-demand the Microsoft Security Response Center Solution Integration and the Red Hat Solution Integration from within the Setup Assistant.

Additional notes for integrations

If multiple deployments are supported for an integration, see Create domain-separated imports for an integration.

You can install, configure, schedule, and launch on-demand many of the integration applications from within Setup Assistant.
You can install the Rapid7 Vulnerability Integration application from Setup Assistant, but configuration is not supported for this integration from within the Setup Assistant. See Install the Rapid7 Vulnerability Integration for more information.
The Tenable for Vulnerability Response application by Tenable is created and maintained by Tenable. See their documentation at Tenable for Vulnerability Response.

During integration execution, multiple processes are generated, and data is received in the form of pages. Each process can contain one or more import queue entries with attached data in pages. These entries must process the data within the one-hour time limit. However, if the payload size is large, the processing time may exceed one hour or get stuck, resulting in an integration timeout error. The integration continues to process the data despite the timeout error. To avoid this miscommunication, starting from version 18.2.4 of Vulnerability Response, timestamps (heartbeats) are sent periodically to indicate if the queue is active and processing data. The Last Record Processed field in the Import Queue Entry page is updated based on the count of records the import queue creates or updates. In case an import queue entry exceeds the one-hour time limit, the system checks the Last Record Processed field to see if it is also older than one hour. If it is, this indicates that the import queue entry is stuck, and it is timed out to prevent any further delays in processing.

Note:

The Last Record Processed field is updated based on what is defined in the following system properties:

sn_sec_cmn.record_threshold_heartbeat: Defines the number of processed records, after which the heartbeat (timestamp) is sent to the import queue entry.
sn_sec_cmn.maximum_heartbeat_delay: Defines the time after which the import queue entry must be timed out.

Starting from VR v17.1, the following integration process state names have been updated:


State name prior to V17.1	State name V17.1 onwards
Processing	Retrieving
WaitComplete	Waiting/Processing

Note:

You can view the attachments that are downloaded and processed. When the status of the integration run is waitcomplete, it displays the percentage of integration that is complete.

Manually created integrations

You can add other integrations that are not available as ServiceNow Store applications, as needed. See Manually create a vulnerability integration for more information.

Vulnerability Response applications and CSDM tables

The Vulnerability Response, Application Vulnerability Response, third-party vulnerability integrations and Software Bill of Materials applications manage (contribute data to) CSDM tables. These applications also use data from CSDM tables that other applications generate. Several ServiceNow products, therefore, benefit from and add value to these Security Operations applications. See Vulnerability Response applications and CSDM tables for more information.