The case for vulnerability management

In June 2017, the Petya ransomware was a global threat that was taking advantage of an SMB flaw in the Windows operating system as a vector to propagate itself. For many enterprises, this became an all-hands-on-deck situation where systems were being patched in order to protect themselves from the ransomware. Microsoft released a patch for CVE-2017-0199 in April 2017 that mitigated the flaw in the SMB protocol that Petya used. If enterprises had strong patch management procedures in place, the already released patch would have been deployed months before Petya became a global threat.