CVE management: automate discovery to remediation

When your security team asks, "Are we vulnerable to CVE-2026-XXXX?" the answer needs to come in minutes, not hours.

With over 100 new CVEs published daily—and some days exceeding 1,000—manual vulnerability tracking can't keep pace. The organizations that respond fastest to emerging threats are the ones automating their security workflows.

In this blog post, you'll learn how to:

• Search vulnerabilities by CVE number, package, or host
• Automate the path from discovery to remediation
• Secure your automation credentials (they're an attack vector, too)
• Build audit trails that satisfy compliance requirements

100+	Minutes, not days	Zero
New CVEs published daily	Time to identify affected systems	Manual compliance reports needed

For the business case and leadership perspective, see our companion piece on the strategic case for security automation.

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The security challenge

Security teams face mounting pressure from multiple directions. The volume of published vulnerabilities continues to grow, and the window between disclosure and active exploitation keeps shrinking. Meanwhile, infrastructure has become more distributed and complex, making it harder to maintain visibility across all systems.

Manual patching compounds these challenges. When one administrator spends their entire day logging into systems and running package updates, that approach works until you have hundreds or thousands of hosts. It also introduces inconsistency—different people patch systems differently—and creates gaps when team members are unavailable.

Auditors increasingly want real-time answers about vulnerability exposure. They want to know not just that you patched something, but when, by whom, and whether any systems were missed. Traditional approaches struggle to provide this level of detail without significant manual effort.

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Ascender Pro's approach

Ascender Pro integrates CVE and errata information from Rocky Linux directly into your system monitoring workflow. Rather than treating vulnerability data as a separate silo that requires manual correlation with your infrastructure inventory, Ascender Pro brings this information together automatically.

The platform provides enhanced errata analysis that lets you examine vulnerabilities by package or by specific CVE. Visual charts show vulnerability distribution across your infrastructure by severity level, making it easy to prioritize remediation efforts. Security updates are categorized as Critical, Important, Moderate, or Low, so your team can focus resources where they matter most.

Because Ascender Pro collects package information from every managed host during automation runs, it maintains a current picture of what software exists across your entire environment. When new vulnerability information becomes available, you can immediately see which systems are affected.

This same infrastructure powers compliance automation capabilities that reduce audit prep from weeks to days.

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Multiple pathways to vulnerability information

One of Ascender Pro's key strengths is flexibility in finding vulnerability information. Different situations call for different approaches.

Search by CVE number:

When security teams learn about a new vulnerability and need to quickly determine exposure. Enter the CVE identifier and immediately see all affected hosts and the specific packages involved.

Answers: "How many of our systems are vulnerable to this specific threat?"

Search by package:

When you want a comprehensive view of all vulnerabilities affecting a particular piece of software. Search for your HTTP server package and see every CVE that affects any version currently deployed.

Answers: "What's our total exposure for this software component?"

Search by host:

When you need to assess the security posture of a specific system—perhaps a server moving to a more sensitive network segment, or documentation for an audit.

Answers: "What vulnerabilities exist on this specific system?"

Filter by severity:

Prioritize your remediation queue. Critical vulnerabilities on internet-facing systems demand immediate attention, while low-severity issues on internal development hosts can wait.

Answers: "What should we patch first?"

The click-through navigation between these views makes it easy to pivot your investigation as you learn more.

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Case study: Responding to a new CVE

Your security team learns about a high-severity vulnerability affecting OpenSSL. Here's how the response unfolds:

1. Search — Enter the CVE number in Ascender Pro. Within seconds, results show which hosts are running affected package versions.

2. Scope — Determine the scale. Are we talking about 5 hosts or 500? Production or development? This drives remediation priority.

3. Remediate — For critical vulnerabilities, trigger an automated patching workflow directly from the interface. The workflow handles the package update, validates the change, and logs everything.

4. Verify — Regenerate the CVE search to confirm all vulnerable systems have been addressed.

5. Document — The comprehensive logging provides audit documentation automatically: when each system was patched, by whom, and verification that remediation succeeded.

Total time from alert to verified remediation: hours instead of days.

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See it in action

Want to see how CVE search, automated patching, and compliance reporting work together? Read the Ascender Pro solution brief and contact our team for a walk-through of the complete workflow.

Contact CIQ | Read the solution brief

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Secrets management: Securing your automation

Effective vulnerability remediation requires automation, and automation requires credentials. How you manage those credentials determines whether your automation platform strengthens or undermines your security posture.

The problem with plaintext

Storing plaintext passwords in playbooks creates obvious risks. Those credentials end up in version control history, potentially accessible to anyone who can view the repository. Even if your repository is private today, accidental exposure could make those credentials public tomorrow.

Option 1: Ansible Vault

Ansible Vault encrypts sensitive data within your playbooks using SHA-256 encryption. When you run automation, you provide the vault password to decrypt credentials at runtime. Ascender Pro supports this through vault credentials.

Limitation: Encrypted secrets still exist in your source code management system.

Option 2: Ascender Pro credential management

Secrets are stored with SHA-256 encryption and only utilized at execution time—no sensitive data needs to exist in your playbooks.

Credential type	Use case
Machine credentials	SSH keys, passwords for servers and network devices
Custom credentials	API keys, tokens, specialized secrets
Vault credentials	Decryption passwords for Ansible Vault files

Option 3: External secrets engines

For organizations with existing secrets infrastructure, Ascender Pro integrates with:

• HashiCorp Vault
• CyberArk
• Delinea (formerly Thycotic)

When automation launches, the platform queries the secrets engine to retrieve current credentials, which are then injected into playbook execution. This supports per-host password lookup for environments where each system has unique credentials.

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Automated patching workflows

Moving from manual to automated patching transforms both speed and consistency.

Scheduled updates

Security updates run during designated maintenance windows without requiring someone to be present. The platform handles package updates using the appropriate package manager—DNF for modern Rocky Linux, YUM for older versions, PowerShell for Windows.

Batch processing

Define groups based on system criticality, geographic location, or application tier. Patch development systems first, validate that applications still function, then proceed to staging and production.

Pre/Post validation

Run health checks, verify service status, and confirm application functionality as part of the same workflow that performs patching.

Rollback capability

When patches cause problems, restore the previous state. For VMware environments, workflows can create snapshots before making changes.

The entire process generates audit logs showing what changed, when, and on which systems.

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Baseline comparison and drift detection

Security requires knowing not just what vulnerabilities exist, but whether unauthorized changes have occurred.

Establish baselines

Define a baseline package set representing your approved software configuration. Ascender Pro then identifies any extra packages installed beyond that baseline.

Detect drift

Track when packages are added or removed from systems, whether through automation or manual intervention. If someone installed telnet on a server where it shouldn't exist, that deviation becomes visible.

Historical view

This proves invaluable for troubleshooting and demonstrates continuous compliance to auditors.

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Monitoring and reporting

CVE dashboard

Visual summary of vulnerability exposure across your infrastructure. Charts break down errata by severity level and OS version.

Scheduled reports

Weekly vulnerability summaries for security teams, monthly compliance reports for auditors, and quarterly executive briefings. Configure once; generate automatically.

Alert integration

Trigger notifications when:

• Prohibited packages appear on systems
• Critical vulnerabilities are detected
• Package changes occur outside approved windows

Alerts can trigger webhooks, or kick off remediation workflows automatically.

Self-service auditor access

Give auditors direct access to compliance data with read-only permissions. They can run searches, generate reports, and verify status without pulling your team off other work.

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Next steps

Ready to strengthen your vulnerability management?

Explore the Ascender Pro Solution Brief to learn more about security features, or contact CIQ to schedule a demonstration of CVE tracking and automated remediation workflows in action.