How do mitigation tools help companies?
C. They identify vulnerabilities that scanners do not.
Mitigation tools are used to deal with the other 60% of the environment's weaknesses that are not addressed by patches. Products like Foundstone's FS 1000 Appliance, Citadel's Hercules, St. Bernard's SecurityEXPERT and others have hardening templates and policies that can be loaded and configured to ensure that configurations are set to ensure a hardened system. These templates can conform to the NSA Security Hardening Guides, SANS Windows 2000 Gold Standard registry settings, and auditing policies based on SANS, NIST or DISA standards.