Introduction

Tenable’s 2021 Threat Landscape Retrospective is an analysis of the past year’s significant vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that led to data breaches in 2021. This information provides valuable insight for security managers and analysts to ensure their security strategy and implementation align with the current threat landscape. The report highlights publicly available information on data breaches and contains references to CVE Records and CVSS Scores from critical events and key vulnerabilities that were reported and analyzed during 2021. Use the information in this Cyber Exposure Study to perform a targeted review of your organization’s environment against the current threat and vulnerability landscape to effectively allocate resources. The logic behind the Tenable Vulnerability Management widget and filter creation described in this study can be applied to any new research report, whitepaper, or applicable framework for your environment.

The 2021 Threat Landscape Retrospective Tenable Vulnerability Management Dashboard uses CVE filters to display the top five most notable vulnerabilities and provides indicators, by vendor, for the remaining key vulnerabilities identified in 2021. Many of the widgets within the dashboard provide guidance to identify these vulnerabilities, including correlation between CVSSv3 scores and the CVEs discussed in the Threat Landscape Retrospective. See the Tenable Vulnerability Management Widget Library for a comprehensive list of useful widgets. Analysts can also leverage the 2021 Threat Landscape Retrospective Tactical Scan Template and other tactical scan templates for a targeted review of the infrastructure.