DeepSurface: Accepted Risk Workflow

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An accepted risk plan is your way of telling DeepSurface that you have accepted the risk of a particular item in the reports and you no longer want this item to show up in DeepSurface reports.

Creating an accepted risk plan is very similar to the workflow of creating a remediation plan while navigating the DeepSurface interface.

Accepted risk plans can be created from the main report pages within the Risk Insight section of the application. Visit Risk Insight > Hosts or Risk Insight > Vulnerability Analysis and select one or more items to begin creating a plan.

Creating a Plan for a Single Item

The options and implications for an accepted risk plan change slightly depending on if you are creating a plan for a single item or multiple items. Before creating a plan, it is important to understand that a plan will always exist as a one to many relationship. Therefore, the possible combinations can be either:

1 host with many vulnerabilities or 1 vulnerability on many hosts. As an example, to create an accepted risk plan for a single host, simply check the box next to the host you would like to accept:

You will then see the choice of whether to add this host to a remediation plan or an accepted risk plan. After choosing the accepted risk plan option, you will see a form that looks similar to the following:

The form will let you choose a reason for creating this plan, an expiration date for this plan, an owner, any additional notes, and which particular vulnerabilities you want to accept the risk of for this host.

Accepted Risk Plan Reason

The first option on the form is to choose a reason for accepting this risk. The reasons are broken up into 2 general categories of Not Exploitable and Accepting Risk. Think of these two categories as "I disagree with DeepSurface because I have more information than they do" and "I agree with DeepSurface, but I still don't want to see this in my reports". Within these 2 general categories are nuanced reasons for specifically why you are choosing this category. Depending on which category you choose, DeepSurface will compute and analyze your overall risk slightly differently:

Choosing a Not Exploitable reason will instruct DeepSurface to hide this item from your reports, and DeepSurface will recalculate the risk of all items in your environment upon a subsequent risk analysis job. It is helpful to think of a plan created in this way as actually removing these items from the model entirely. This will have a greater impact on all other items in the model and therefore, when deleting a plan created in this way, it is necessary to re-run analysis again in order to see these items re-appear in your threat model.

Choosing an Accepting Risk reason will instruct DeepSurface to hide this item from your reports, but not recalculate the risk for every other item in the model. It's as if it is still there, but just hidden from all of the reports. DeepSurface will run a partial analysis, the risk acceptance plan will be created, and the item(s) will no longer appear in your reports. To see this item appear again in your reports, delete the accepted risk plan in the Remediation > Accepted Risk Plans section of the application.

Accepted Risk Plan Items

Continuing with the same example (accepted risk plan for a single host), the final step in the accepted risk form is to choose which vulnerabilities you want to accept on this host. Since you have only selected one host in this scenario, you can select any number of vulnerabilities (even all of them).

Creating a Plan for a multiple Items

Creating a plan for multiple items is very similar to creating a plan for a single item. The reason, expiration, owner, and notes are all the same, but since this time around you are starting with many items, you can only choose a single item in the plan items section at the bottom. The items available to choose between represent the items that all the selected items have in common (ie, if all the selected hosts have the same vulnerability it will appear in the list, but if any of the selected hosts are missing that vulnerability, it will not be included).

Filtering by Accepted Risk Status

As stated above, once an accepted risk plan has been created for an item, it will no longer appear in your reports. It is possible, however, to still see the items without deleting an accepted risk plan. For Risk Insight > Host, Patch, and Vulnerability Analysis reports simply open the filters interface and you will see the Include Accepted Risk Items filter with 3 options:

By default reports will hide all items that are in accepted risk plans, but you also choose to view only the items that exist in accepted risk plans or all items, regardless of their accepted risk status.