Unified Security Exposure Management (USEM) notes

The ServiceNow® Unified Security Exposure Management (USEM) application enhances exposure management with role-based views, enabling faster decision-making, efficient task handling, and streamlined approvals. It centralizes workflows, improves visibility across exposures, and enforces governance through configurable rules. With consistent navigation and integrated configuration, USEM boosts productivity, collaboration, and control across security operations, delivering a unified experience for exposures across assets. USEM was enhanced and updated in the Australia release.

Unified Security Exposure Management highlights for the Australia release

• Vulnerability management teams can use AI Security Exposure Management and supported integrations to reduce the AI attack surface by efficiently remediating security exposures in AI assets.
• USEM was enhanced and updated in the Australia release to support the new AI native experience.
• Administrators can manage user and group role assignments, create/update watchdogs with custom conditions, and access a centralized Advanced Settings page — all directly from the Security Exposure Management Workspace, eliminating the need to navigate multiple configuration pages.
• Assign tags to security incidents, response tasks, vulnerable items, observables, IoCs, and security cases to define metadata and access control all directly from the Security Exposure Management Workspace.
• Third-party source severity fields are now normalized into standard ServiceNow severity values all directly in the Security Exposure Management Workspace.
• Approvers can bulk approve or reject multiple requests in a single action.
• The AWS Integration for Security Exposure Management supports integrations with AWS Inspector and AWS Security Hub.

See Unified Security Exposure Management (USEM) for more information.

Important:

Unified Security Exposure Management is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

Important information for upgrading Unified Security Exposure Management to Australia

To access the new AI native experience in the Unified Security Exposure Management (USEM) workspace, you must upgrade to the Australia release.

ServiceNow product tiers

The ServiceNow AI Platform now brings you a new AI experience with three licensing tiers available:

• Foundation: AI basics to deliver insights
• Advanced: AI to boost productivity across relevant use cases
• Prime: Act autonomously with all AI assets and create your own

Depending on your entitlements, you will have access to certain application features, generative AI skills, agentic workflows, and AI agents.

Unified Security Exposure Management is available to all customers who are entitled to Vulnerability Response, however, migrating to USEM is a major upgrade that introduces a unified architecture for improved performance, scalability, and streamlined workflows. Before upgrading, leverage the Migration assistant for Unified Security Exposure Management that is available as an update set. See the Migration Guidance to Unified Security Exposure Management [KB2556844] Knowledge Base article for more information. This tool provides a guided experience for plugin installation, data mapping, rule migration, and post-migration validation, reducing risk and manual effort. Ensure that all integrations and workflows are reviewed for compatibility before initiating migration. For more information, see Migrating from Vulnerability Response to Unified Security Exposure Management (USEM) and Migrate to Unified Security Exposure Management (USEM) from Vulnerability Response.

New in the Australia release

Risk reduction requests for multiple findings

You can now submit risk reduction requests for multiple findings at once using Bulk Edit in the Security Exposure Management Workspace. This reduces manual effort and simplifies the risk acceptance workflow.

Smart Assessment support for exception requestsSmart Assessment support for exception requests

Request Exception option now supports Smart Assessment. When you select Request for Risk Reduction, the compensating control questionnaire takes priority and is displayed instead of the exception questionnaire, based on your exception management configuration.

Auto-close rules now run in parallel, reducing processing time for large datasets

Previously, auto-close rules ran as a single sequential job. Starting with v30.3.3, the system automatically splits processing into multiple concurrent jobs based on data volume — no configuration required. Simply enable an auto-close rule and the system handles the rest.

Deferred migration option for Unified Security Exposure Management (USEM)

If you're not ready to migrate to Unified Security Exposure Management (USEM), you can select Upgrade later button to defer the process. The Migration Assistant will be hidden from the main view but remains accessible via the Filter Navigator whenever you're ready to proceed.

Configure users and groups in Security Exposure Management Workspace

Administrators can now assign and remove product-specific roles for users and groups directly from the Security Exposure Management workspace. This workspace-based experience provides a consistent, centralized interface for controlling access across supported exposure management products.

Security tag groups and tags for organized security content

Administrators can now create and manage security tag groups and tags directly from the Security Exposure Management Workspace. Tags can be applied to security incidents, response tasks, vulnerable items, observables, IoCs, and security cases to attach metadata to responding records and define access controls for specific types of security content.

Watchdog configuration

Administrators can now create and manage watchdogs from the Security Exposure Management Workspace. Each watchdog monitors a specified table for conditions you define, and can be configured to notify designated users or groups when those conditions are met.

Severity mapping for third-party integrations

Administrators can now create and manage severity maps from the Security Exposure Management Workspace. Severity mapping normalizes source-specific severity fields from third-party integrations into the standardized severity scale used by Unified Security Exposure Management. This ensures consistent severity representation across all integrated data sources.

Background job configuration

A new Background Job Configuration tile is now available in the Other section of the Security Exposure Management Workspace Administration console. Selecting the tile opens the Background Job Configuration page providing a consistent workspace-based entry point for managing background job settings.

Advanced settings

Administrators can now configure advanced system-level settings from the Security Exposure Management Workspace. The Advanced Settings page provides a single location for managing behavior across exposure management, remediation workflows, compliance handling, and service impact calculations.

Bulk approval and rejection

Approvers can now process multiple exception requests simultaneously from a single list view, which can help with significantly reducing manual effort for high-volume approval workflows.

New KPI tiles for exception management

Added new KPI tiles to the Exception Management dashboard for Expiring Exceptions, Exception Extensions, and Repeated Rejections, giving approvers and managers additional visibility into exception health and lifecycle trends.

AWS Integration for Security Exposure Management

The AWS Integration for Security Exposure Management supports integrations with the following AWS services:

• AWS Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continuously scans EC2 instances, ECR container images, and Lambda functions for software vulnerabilities (CVEs) and unintended network exposure. The Vulnerability Response integration with AWS Inspector imports host and container vulnerability findings from AWS Inspector.
• AWS Security Hub is a security service that is used to centralize and update security checks across AWS accounts. It provides a unified view of security alerts and compliance status by integrating with various AWS services. The Vulnerability Response integration with AWS Security Hub imports host, container vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations from AWS Security Hub.

Unified Microsoft Defender Integration for Security Exposure Management

The Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Defender Threat and Vulnerability Management (MS TVM) plugins are now consolidated into a single plugin: Microsoft Defender Integration for Security Exposure Management. This consolidation deprecates the standalone Microsoft Defender for Cloud plugin. The unified plugin also introduces container image vulnerability ingestion from Microsoft Defender for Cloud, creating Container Vulnerable Items on your instance. A guided migration path is available to transfer existing data from the deprecated applications to the unified plugin.

Optimized Tenable.io Compliance Results ingestion

Starting with v 6.1.3, the Tenable.io Compliance Results Integration is replaced by the Tenable.io Fixed Compliance Results Integration and Tenable.io Open Compliance Results Integration. Compliance results are now imported based on their status, optimizing ingestion performance and scalability for environments with large volumes of compliance data while keeping remediation and compliance tracking aligned with the current state of findings.

Qualys Integration – API enhancements

The Qualys Vulnerability Integration has been upgraded to support newer Qualys API versions across Host Detection, Host List, Knowledgebase, PC Controls, PC Policies, and PCRS integrations. The integrations now ingest additional data fields, including vulnerability detection source, authentication privilege status, active status for controls and policies, and cloud metadata, giving you better visibility into your vulnerability and compliance data. Use the new posture_api_version integration instance parameter to choose between the default v2.0 APIs or the newer v5.0 streaming APIs for the PCRS Policy Host and PCRS Test Results integrations.

GitHub Application Vulnerability Integration – Generic secrets support

The GitHub Secret Scanning Integration now imports generic secrets in addition to standard secrets from your GitHub repositories. A new Manage generic secrets in ServiceNow configuration option lets you control whether generic secrets are ingested. Imported secrets are mapped to Application Vulnerable Items (AVIs) with the scan type, Secret, while generic secrets are mapped with the scan type, Generic Secret.

Changed in this release

Improved vulnerability assessment workflows

• CI filtering for vulnerability assessments: You can now filter which configuration items are included in a vulnerability assessment using a condition builder.
• Business Application population on AVITs: AVITs created from SBOM assessment results now include Business Application information, helping you understand application impact and prioritize remediation.
• Priority roll‑down from vulnerability assessments: Updates to the priority of a vulnerability assessment now automatically roll down to associated VITs and AVITs, ensuring consistent prioritization based on the highest severity.

Remediation task rule execution mode

You can now choose how remediation task rules are evaluated during ingestion. The new Match First execution mode evaluates rules sequentially and applies only the first matching rule, assigning each finding to exactly one remediation task. The default Match All mode continues to evaluate all applicable rules.

Enhanced Compensatory controls

When new vulnerable items are ingested and associated with a remediation task that already has an approved compensating control, the reduced risk rating is now automatically inherited by those new vulnerable items.

Activation information

Install Unified Security Exposure Management by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store to view all the available apps, and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.