Recently, a collaborative effort between Thirdera, Tenable, and ServiceNow has led to the identification and resolution of a subtle but impactful issue affecting vulnerability reporting accuracy.
Some organizations using Tenable for vulnerability scanning and ServiceNow Vulnerability Response (VR) for management noticed a discrepancy in their reporting. Specifically, a small number of findings closed by Tenable were not getting closed in ServiceNow. This issue was particularly noticeable for teams aiming for 100% vulnerability remediation, as it created a perception of incomplete remediation even when issues had been resolved.
Through investigation and collaboration with Tenable support, our team at Thirdera helped identify the root cause of this issue. The problem stemmed from a component of Tenable's back-end database implementation, which occasionally ran out of resources, resulting in incomplete API responses.
This issue likely affected numerous Tenable and ServiceNow customers, potentially leading to manual workarounds such as marking items as 'False Positives' when remediation teams confirmed that fixes were already in place.
Thanks to the coordinated efforts between Thirdera, Tenable, and ServiceNow, Tenable has implemented a mitigation for this issue and is working on a more permanent solution. This solution is a change to Tenable back-end systems and does not require any customer action to resolve.
We encourage all Tenable and ServiceNow VR users to ensure they're running the latest versions of their software to benefit from this and other recent improvements.
At Thirdera, we remain committed to working closely with our technology partners and clients to ensure the highest levels of accuracy and efficiency in vulnerability management and other critical IT processes.