What is a Vulnerability Assessment?

• Vulnerability Assessment Definition

  Vulnerability Assessment Definition

  Vulnerability assessment, a proactive approach to cybersecurity, aims at discovering security flaws in your applications, workstations, or entire organizational network in a systematic and organized way. It’s a crucial part of IT risk management, allowing security teams to classify, prioritize, and rank security vulnerabilities according to their risk levels for timely remediation.
• Security vulnerability assessment process

  Security vulnerability assessment process

  Outlined below are detailed steps to identify vulnerabilities using security scanning.

  Initial Assessment: The process of identifying vulnerabilities begins with creating a list of an organization's mission-critical IT assets holding the most sensitive business information. Security teams also record additional information of such assets to create system baselines, like the number of open ports (exposed to the public internet) and device drivers.

  Vulnerability Scanning: Involves determining the total number of known vulnerabilities or security flaws in organizations' IT assets. IT security teams typically rely on automated scanning tools, vulnerability databases, and threat intelligence feeds for security loophole detection. Vulnerability scanners work in concert with other network security and vulnerability management tools such as SolarWinds^® Patch Manager and Security Event Manager (SEM) for comprehensive risk assessment. For example, network security tools like SEM leverage vulnerability scanning data for quick threat identification. Similarly, automated scanners can identify new, additional vulnerabilities emerging from firmware upgrades made by a patch manager.

  Vulnerability Analysis: Involves identifying the primary causes of security pitfalls in organizations. For example, the root cause of unexpected equipment failure could be faulty device configurations or outdated hardware. Besides determining the problem source, security analysts also categorize and prioritize vulnerabilities at this stage based on the severity or the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score assigned to them. Assigning severity scores depends on multiple factors such as affected systems, processes, data, and potential damage resulting from a security loophole. Quantifying threats also help security teams proactively track the most sensitive applications and workstations for unknown threats or malicious activities.

  Remediation: Aims to patch security vulnerabilities across an organization's IT infrastructure through firmware upgrades, configuration modifications, and installing new hardware. Automated tools such as Patch Manager can help organizations quickly detect and patch their business-critical applications, workstations, and virtual servers through a single interface and enhance their security controls. Further, modern third-party patching tools sync with native patch management tools such as SCCM and WSUS for better control. Pushing bulk updates, scheduling patches, and targeting specific devices for upgrades is also easier with third-party tools.

  Document and Repeat: At last, organizations prepare a detailed vulnerability investigation report outlining the security flaws and their severity, potential impact, and recommended mitigation measures. The findings of such assessments are critical for effective IT risk management. In addition, organizations should conduct such tests regularly and record the latest results to optimize their overall network security.
• Types of vulnerability assessments

  Types of vulnerability assessments

  Outlined below are some common vulnerability detection methods.

  Application Assessment: Involves detecting threats and vulnerabilities in business-critical web applications' architecture, including source code and database. Organizations rely on vulnerability scanning tools for examining unknown issues in web applications.

  Host Assessment: Examines the security flaws across the computer systems, servers, and other network hosts. Host-based vulnerability scanning tools typically deploy agent software on monitored devices to detect unauthorized configuration changes and other security issues.

  Network Assessment: Involves identifying security weaknesses in wired and wireless networks. It detects vulnerabilities around the existing network security controls and policies of an organization that could lead to a potential cyberattack or exploitation of network-accessible resources.

  Database Assessment: Uncovers the unpatched vulnerabilities in database systems or servers such as SQL injections, misconfigurations, and escalated privileges. Identifying such security flaws is critical to prevent unauthorized data exfiltration by attackers.

  IT security teams often run internal and external vulnerability scans after implementing substantial changes across their IT infrastructure to detect new, additional security loopholes. They employ automated vulnerability detection tools to execute both types of scans in a quick, efficient manner. Let's understand these two kinds of scans in detail:

  Internal Vulnerability Scan: Aligns with the zero-trust security ideology, which states organizations shouldn’t implicitly trust the users or systems inside their network. They must conduct robust internal vulnerability assessments scans to detect potential insider threats or malicious activities.

  External Vulnerability Scan: Focuses on examining the security flaws around the IT infrastructure components that directly connect with the internet or are readily accessible to users outside the organization, like network ports, web apps, and other customer-facing applications.
• Vulnerability assessment vs. penetration testing

  Vulnerability assessment vs. penetration testing

  Vulnerability analysis and penetration testing can help organizations increase their cyber resilience and stay compliant with various information security regulations like PCI DSS. Both tests detect the known vulnerabilities in organizations' IT infrastructure and report potential risks. These tests are often carried out in tandem for comprehensive network security, making it difficult for organizations to spot their differences. Let's explore each in detail.

  Vulnerability detection typically relies on automation tools to scan all the assets in an organization's IT environment for known vulnerabilities like faulty configurations and unpatched systems. These vulnerabilities or security flaws often represent the greatest threat to organizations' mission-critical applications or systems. With every network scan, automated vulnerability scanners provide a detailed investigation report outlining each vulnerability and its associated risk, priority, and potential impact. These scanners rely on the common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) for vulnerability classification and prioritization. The reports sometimes contain false positives, which indicates the security loophole identified during a network scan isn’t severe enough to be classified as a threat or vulnerability. Therefore, verifying the automated scan results through manual methods or multiple tools becomes crucial. Further, vulnerability assessments scans are economical and investigate a broad array of organizational IT assets in a single iteration. Organizations' internal security teams with decent knowledge of network security concepts and vulnerability scanner tools can conduct these tests efficiently.

  In contrast, penetration testing is a mock cyberattack involving ethical hackers, also known as penetration testers, attempting to infiltrate an organization's security perimeters to exfiltrate valuable data through techniques such as SQL injection, buffer overflow, and brute force attacks. Compared to vulnerability scans, penetration tests are more comprehensive, targeted, and costlier. Highly skilled and experienced security analysts and testing teams execute these tests manually, which isn’t always the case in vulnerability scans. However, penetration testers can occasionally use automated scanners in the initial investigation or complex scenarios such as detecting unpatched network devices. After initial testing, penetration testers investigate every identified security flaw or vulnerability manually and confirm whether it's exploitable or not. It also helps eliminate false positives, making test results more accurate and reliable. Further, penetration tests not only uncover maximum security loopholes in an organization's network, but also identify ways to remediate them, making them more rigorous and longer than vulnerability scans. Likewise, organizations often seek external security specialists' assistance for more exhaustive and unbiased penetration testing, usually not required in vulnerability testing.