From Vulnerability to Visibility: Rethinking Exposure Management

In this conversation with ITSP Magazine, recorded live from the bustling floor of InfoSec Europe 2025, Tod Beardsley, VP of Security Research at runZero, explores the evolution of modern exposure management — and how organizations can shift from merely identifying vulnerabilities to achieving true visibility and control.

Going Beyond CVEs

Security leaders face a persistent challenge: understanding what truly exists in their environments and how it contributes to organizational risk. While vulnerability scoring systems like Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), and Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC) offer frameworks for prioritizing patching and remediation, they often fall short in the real-world conditions of fragmented IT environments, cloud sprawl, and unmanaged assets. The gap between theoretical risk scoring and operational reality leaves defenders overwhelmed, uncertain where to focus, and vulnerable to avoidable incidents.

runZero addresses these issues by offering a solution that is built not just to catalog known assets, but to illuminate the unknown — those overlooked, misconfigured, or entirely forgotten devices that may never trigger a CVE alert but can still open doors for attackers.

The Challenge: Volume Without Context

Most security teams use traditional scoring models to triage vulnerabilities. But as Tod points out, the results often default to meaningless averages. “CVSS 7.8” might be the most common score, but it doesn’t help teams determine which of the 50,000 flagged vulnerabilities truly matter in their environment.

Add to this the misalignment between vulnerability scores and business priorities. Scoring systems were never designed to consider asset importance, exploitability in context, or exposure due to misconfigurations like open management ports, default passwords, or forgotten IoT devices. The outcome is predictable: overworked teams, inefficient patching cycles, and a risk register that grows faster than it can be resolved.

Visibility Gap: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Modern enterprise environments are rarely limited to well-inventoried servers and laptops. Shadow IT, vendor-managed appliances, smart devices, legacy operating systems, and remote work infrastructure all contribute to a murky asset landscape. These assets often live outside traditional IT management tools, making them invisible to both endpoint detection systems and vulnerability scanners.

runZero’s asset intelligence platform fills this blind spot by scanning networks without credentials or agents — treating the environment the way an attacker would. It identifies devices based on their network behavior, flags unusual configurations, and uncovers systems that other tools miss entirely.

Beardsley describes it as “shining a light into the dark corners” of the network. Whether it’s identifying a multi-homed light bulb acting as a network bridge or spotting end-of-life operating systems still powering critical functions, runZero surfaces the risks most security teams don’t know they have.

Aligning IT and Security Priorities

runZero’s platform also empowers defenders to contextualize asset and vulnerability data in terms that matter to the business. By leveraging models like SSVC (Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization), security teams can explain why a particular asset or exposure should take precedence — whether it supports a mission-critical process or introduces cross-network risk.

This alignment with business risk isn’t just academic. It supports better prioritization, enables more credible communications with leadership, and helps justify decisions around remediation and investment. It also turns exposure management from a daily firefight into a strategic capability.

Streamlining Operations Across Use Cases

Beyond day-to-day operations, runZero provides significant value in specialized scenarios like mergers and acquisitions. When acquiring companies, security teams need to assess not just intellectual property or application architecture — but the technical debt embedded in infrastructure. runZero enables acquiring firms to conduct a rapid, low-friction scan of the target environment, identifying aging hardware, outdated software, and unmanaged assets without requiring agents or access credentials.

This capability accelerates due diligence, supports valuation adjustments based on hidden risk, and provides a roadmap for secure integration post-acquisition.

The Outcome: Actionable Risk Reduction

runZero doesn’t replace vulnerability scoring systems — it makes them useful. By enriching those scores with actual asset intelligence, it enables defenders to act with confidence. Teams using runZero often discover they have 25% more assets than they thought — each one a potential risk if left unmanaged. The platform’s continuous updates and rapid response capabilities also help teams stay ahead of breaking vulnerabilities and media-driven hype, focusing only on what matters in their specific environment.

runZero transforms exposure management from a checkbox exercise into a proactive, context-driven capability — helping security teams cut through the noise, identify real threats, and protect the business where it counts.

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