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Impact & Risk Analysis

  • Severity: High
  • CIS Benchmark: CIS 4.4
  • Impact: Exploitation of Known Vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are loopholes or bugs in software that can be exploited by hackers. If images are not scanned and rebuilt frequently, they may contain outdated software with known security flaws (CVEs), making the container easy to compromise even if the configuration is secure.

Common Misconfiguration

Deploying an image once and leaving it running for months without updates (“Stale Images”). Even if an image was secure when first built, new vulnerabilities are discovered daily. Failing to integrate a vulnerability scanner into the CI/CD pipeline allows these vulnerable images to reach production.

Vulnerable Example

Secure Example

Audit Procedure

List all running instances of containers:
For each container instance, verify if it has been scanned recently. Alternatively, run an image vulnerability assessment tool against all images in your environment:

Remediation

Images should be re-built ensuring that the latest version of the base images are used to keep the operating system patch level at an appropriate level. Once the images have been re-built and scanned, containers should be re-started making use of the updated images.