Exception Management overview
Summarize
Summary of Exception Management Overview
Exception Management allows organizations to request, review, and approve exceptions for vulnerabilities or remediation tasks that cannot be addressed due to existing policies, standards, or lack of available fixes. It acknowledges the risk involved in not remediating certain vulnerabilities.
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Key Features
- Exception Definition: A formal request to defer the remediation of a vulnerable item (VI) or remediation task (RT) for a specified duration.
- Request Process: Remediation owners can request exceptions, which, upon approval, change the VI or RT status to Deferred.
- Approval Workflow: Exception requests undergo a review process by vulnerability analysts and may require a two-level approval system.
- Tracking: The status of exception requests can be monitored through the State Change Approvals tab associated with the VI or RT.
- Expiry Management: Expired requests revert the VI or RT to the Open state, allowing for renewed action.
- Deferral Tracking: The system tracks how many times a record has been deferred, with a scheduled job updating these counts daily.
Key Outcomes
By utilizing Exception Management, organizations can effectively manage vulnerabilities that cannot be immediately remediated, ensuring compliance with security policies while accepting and tracking associated risks. This process helps maintain an organized approach to vulnerability management and enhances overall security posture.
When your organization can't comply with a published vulnerability management or security policy, standard, or guideline, you can request an exception. Exception management entails requesting, reviewing, approving, or rejecting exceptions to a vulnerable item (VI) or remediation task (RT) that cannot be remediated according to the policy.
Some vulnerabilities might not have an existing patch, fix, or solution. When an exception is approved, it also means that you're accepting a risk because you're acknowledging and agreeing to the consequences of not remediating the vulnerability.
Life cycle of an exception
- Definition of an exception
- An exception is a request to defer the remediation of a VI or RT for a specified period. For example, as a remediation owner, you can request an exception if a patch is not available for a machine.
- Requesting an exception
- As the remediation owner, you can ask for an exemption for a VI or RT using the exception management process. After the exception approver approves this request, the VI or RT moves to a Deferred state.
- Approving an exception request
- VIs or RTs that can't be remediated immediately are reviewed by vulnerability analysts, assessed for risk, and approved for deferral until they can be remediated. Approving an exception request can be a two-level workflow. If only the first-level approver is present, the exception can be requested and approved. However, if there's no first-level approver, an exception can't be requested. See Add an exception approver for more information.
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Starting from Vulnerability Response v15.0, if you are deploying the VR application for the first time, the flow designer for exception management is enabled by default. If you are already using the workflow, you can update to the flow designer. In both cases, you cannot change it back to workflow. To configure approval rules for exception management and false positive, see Configure approval rules for Exception Management.
Once an exception request for a VI or RT is approved, you can perform the following actions:- Reopen
- Delete
- Update the Assignment to or Assignment groups fields
- Starting with v23.0 of Vulnerability Response, the Exception Rule State Approval workflow is deprecated and replaced by the flow Exception Rule Approval in the flow designer.
- Tracking an exception request
- After raising the exception, you can track its status by using the State Change Approvals tab of the VI or RT. If an action is taken on an RT, you can't track the status of the individual VIs in that RT.
- Expiry of an exception request
- When an exception request for a particular VI or RT expires, the impacted VI or RT reverts to its Open state.
If a single VI or all the VIs in a RT pass in the next scan, then the VIs and, where applicable, the RT State field changes to Closed with the substate Fixed.
Multiple deferrals
Track the number of times a record or a remediation task is deferred. A scheduled job, set deferral counts, runs daily to post counts for the records that are deferred more than once in the Deferral count column in the Multiple deferrals module for VR. All counts for records associated with a remediation task are collected and posted if a remediation task is deferred more than one time.