Security departments are typically comprised of two core pillars: the Vulnerability Management team and the Security Operations (SOC) team.
Both teams fight tirelessly every day to protect the organization. However, a closer look at their daily routines reveals a strange phenomenon: they appear to be living in parallel universes.
Let’s first examine the world of the “Vulnerability Side.” Their work revolves around vulnerability scanners, CVE databases, and ticketing systems. Their language is built on CVSS scores, technical specifications, and remediation plans. Their KPIs usually focus on “remediation rates for high-risk vulnerabilities” and the “Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR/SLA).” They act as the “Quality Inspectors,” constantly nudging IT and business departments to deploy patches.
Then, there is the world of the “Operations Side.” Their primary battlegrounds are SIEM, EDR, and SOAR. They speak the language of alerts, logs, IOCs, and the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Their KPIs are defined by Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR). Like vigilant “Patrollers,” they spend their days hunting down real-world attack incidents.
The question then arises: what is the actual correlation between the thousands of vulnerabilities discovered by the “Inspectors” and the attackers caught by the “Patrollers” in the real world?
In many organizations, this link is far weaker than one might expect.
Management blind spots are wasting half of our energy
This disconnect is creating a massive waste of resources and significant management blind spots.
- The vulnerability management side is indiscriminately dispatching tickets. The moment they see a CVSS score of 9.8, they immediately assign it the highest priority, demanding a remediation within 24 hours—even at the cost of business disruption. However, they lack the context to know whether that vulnerability is truly exploitable within the company’s specific production environment, or if it is even a point of interest for actual threat actors.
- The security operations side is stuck in a cycle of reactive “firefighting.” They only realize the gravity of a situation after a real-world attack has occurred. Post-incident reviews often reveal that attackers skillfully chained together three “low-to-medium” vulnerabilities to bypass all defenses. Because those three vulnerabilities had low scores, they were likely buried hundreds of positions down the priority list on the vulnerability management side.
The result is a frustrating paradox: we expend immense effort fixing “dead-end paths” that attackers would never take, while the “expressways” actually utilized by attackers are chronically ignored simply because of a low numerical score.
These two teams are effectively speaking different languages. Both are working hard in their own silos, but their efforts fail to create a unified synergy.
To bridge the divide between these two worlds, a shared language is essential
To solve this problem, we must find a common language that allows these two teams to communicate effectively. This language cannot be limited to CVSS scores or the MITRE ATT&CK matrix; it must be something more direct and indisputable—validated, real-world risk.
This “translation” work must be performed by an objective validation process that stands independent of both parties.
One of the core values of the Atlas Cybersecurity Validation Platform is its role as this translator and bridge. What we do is straightforward: we take the theoretical risks identified by the “vulnerability side” and simulate them in a real-world environment to validate whether the “operations side” can detect and respond to the associated attack behaviors.
Specifically, the workflow is as follows:
- Input: Whether it is a CVE discovered by a scanner or a newly released 0-day, any vulnerability can serve as the starting point for validation.
- Validation Process: The ATLASSecurity Validation Platform utilizes automated attack playbooks to safely and realistically simulate the exploitation of these vulnerabilities. It does not just test a single point; more importantly, it attempts post-exploitation actions—such as lateral movement and privilege escalation—to validate exactly how far an attacker could penetrate.
- Output: Once the validation is complete, the platform simultaneously produces results—providing Valuable Security Metrics tailored for both teams:
- For the Vulnerability Management Team: “The CVSS 9.8 vulnerability you identified was successfully blocked by the WAF during validation, resulting in a failed exploit. However, the 6.5 vulnerability allowed direct access to a Web server and subsequent reach into the internal database. Given the critical nature of this asset and its network segment, please move the remediation of the 6.5 vulnerability to the highest priority.”
- For the Security Operations Team: “We just simulated an attack on that 6.5 vulnerability. Your EDR generated an audit log at minute 3, the SIEM only correlated the alert at minute 15, and the Next-Gen Firewall’s IPS module showed no response at all. This highlights specific gaps in your detection and response workflows that require immediate optimization.”
Through this security validation step, the work of both teams is tightly integrated. They begin to focus on a unified objective: blocking the attack paths that are proven to be effective and truly lethal.
A core responsibility of any security leader is to ensure effective synergy across the entire organization. If you find that your vulnerability and operations teams rarely collaborate in the same meeting toward a shared goal, it is a significant red flag.
It is time to tear down the wall between these two parallel universes.
By integrating a continuous, automated validation process into your workflow, you can unify risk perception and calibrate work priorities. It shows the “vulnerability side” what to fix first and tells the “operations side” exactly where to look.
Only when these two core forces pull in the same direction will the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire security architecture see a quantum leap.