Rezilion releases agentless runtime software vulnerability management solution – Source: www.csoonline.com

Software supply chain security vendor Rezilion has announced the release of a new agentless solution for vulnerability management. It enables security teams to monitor exploitable software attack surfaces in runtime without using an agent, reducing the time and overhead required for traditional runtime-based software vulnerability analysis, according to the firm. Rezilion’s new solution covers all versions of Windows and Linux across 12 code languages, it said.

Effective prioritization and remediation of software vulnerabilities can be a significant challenge for organizations, with attackers increasingly targeting software supply chains to exploit weaknesses. The State of Vulnerability Management in DevSecOps report revealed that organizations are losing thousands of hours in time and productivity dealing with backlogs of vulnerabilities that they have neither the time or resources to tackle effectively. More than half of 634 IT and IT security practitioners said their backlog consists of more than 100,000 vulnerabilities and the average number of vulnerabilities in backlogs overall is 1.1 million, according to the data.

Meanwhile, the 2023 Unit 42 Network Threat Trends Research Report revealed a 55% increase in the exploitation of vulnerabilities in 2022 compared to 2021. Recently, a software vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer, a managed file transfer service, caused shockwaves after it was widely exploited by hackers to target organizations across the globe.

Non-agent-based runtime analysis possible by harnessing cloud APIs

Although the software vulnerability risks and management challenges companies face are significant, many vulnerabilities are not actually exploitable in runtime, Rezilion said in a press release. Vulnerability prioritization using runtime data can reveal which vulnerabilities are exploitable depending on a user’s unique environment, helping to reduce vulnerability management “noise” by detecting which specific components need patching, and which don’t.

However, an agent has always been needed to get this visibility into the runtime, which can represent operational risks and overheads, according to Rezilion. Its introduction of an agentless solution that can see into the runtime execution of software and determine which components are vulnerable/exploitable in the runtime context – which the vendor claims is a first – allows customers to ensure software security in production and continuous integration from the convenience of a single platform without interfering with product performance, additional code, or agent execution, Rezilion said.

It took Rezilion years of research to discover that true, non-agent-based runtime analysis is possible by using cloud APIs’ indirect access to instances to reconstruct the execution of code along the lifecycle of hosts and containers, said Shlomi Boutnaru, co-founder and CTO at Rezilion. “This means we can now look at a snapshot of a host or a container and use proprietary forensic methods to reverse-engineer from it the entire code loading and execution history – without actually needing to be there with an agent as it happened.”

Michael Hill is the UK editor of CSO Online. He has spent the past five-plus years covering various aspects of the cybersecurity industry, with particular interest in the ever-evolving role of the human-related elements of information security.