These assessments help identify system flaws and evaluate risks. They also help you close security gaps and improve overall protection against threats. There are many different ways to conduct a vulnerability assessment. 

Identifying Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying and quantifying weaknesses that cybercriminals could exploit. It involves scanning the IT environment with vulnerability scanners and manually testing systems to find flaws. These vulnerabilities are then analyzed and prioritized based on their risk.

Network vulnerabilities are hardware or software issues that expose the network to third-party intrusion. Examples of these include insecure Wi-Fi access points and improperly configured firewalls. Application vulnerabilities are code flaws that hackers can use to gain access to the IT system and steal information. Examples of these include SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks.

Red team assessments involve skilled security professionals who simulate real-world attacks against the organization’s networks and systems to uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses. They can help identify the root causes of certain threats and improve overall cybersecurity posture.

Performing Scans

Vulnerability assessments close security gaps with vulnerability assessment testing to help identify software flaws that hackers can exploit to attack business applications and systems. They can also help reduce the risk of malware infections that could impact organizational data and the availability of IT systems and services to employees and customers.

This involves running automated tools on IT assets in the organization to discover and identify vulnerabilities. The devices can be non-intrusive, intrusive or a combination of both, depending on the type of vulnerability assessment.

Some types of vulnerability scanning include network-based scans that identify vulnerable systems on wired and wireless networks. These host-based scans examine hosts connected to an organization’s IT infrastructure and web application scans to detect security flaws in a business’s website. Other tools search for specific vulnerabilities in IT hardware, such as database systems and servers, or in the underlying code of web applications.

Once the vulnerability assessment results are documented, teams review them to determine their severity and potential impact on the organization’s security posture. They then rank detected flaws based on risk levels to prioritize them for remediation.

Analyzing Vulnerabilities

Identifying vulnerabilities is one thing; knowing how to prioritize those flaws and close security gaps is another. A vulnerability assessment process must be rooted in desirable business outcomes, like achieving compliance, preventing data breaches or reducing recovery time. This will help to keep the process scalable and sustainable, even when an organization’s architecture changes or cyber threats evolve.

Vulnerability assessments begin with inventorying IT assets, identifying existing security risks and establishing an overall risk-versus-benefit baseline for budgeting purposes. Next, the system is scanned by various tools to uncover flaws and conduct penetration testing. These findings are documented and analyzed to determine their potential impact on the security of an asset. The identified vulnerabilities are then ranked based on severity and impact to prioritize remediation efforts.

Vulnerability assessments should be part of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), allowing developers to test and fix vulnerabilities before their applications are deployed. This will ensure the code is secure and prevent misconfigurations from being introduced, thus minimizing the risk of exploited vulnerabilities. This will also enable the business to document and train its developers on safe coding practices to help reduce the number of vulnerabilities in production applications.

Prioritizing Vulnerabilities

Once vulnerabilities are identified, they must be analyzed to determine their risk level. Typically, this step compares the vulnerability’s exploitability, impact and business context. For example, a financial organization will prioritize systems handling sensitive data or ensuring the integrity of transaction processing systems.

Often, the analysis will involve reviewing the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score to assess severity. However, it’s important to consider how low-rated vulnerabilities can be chained together to gain a foothold into the network and compromise an asset.

Another factor in prioritizing vulnerabilities is evaluating the difficulty, cost and time required to remediate them. This helps to balance the urgency of addressing high-risk vulnerabilities with the practicalities of implementing patching measures.

Finally, aligning vulnerability assessment testing priorities with business impacts and regulatory requirements is important. For example, a healthcare organization may prioritize vulnerabilities impacting patient confidentiality and compliance with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards. This will ensure that the assessment is helping to close the security gaps that matter most to the business.

Remediating Vulnerabilities

Once vulnerabilities are discovered, the next step is to remediate them. Remediation can include:

• Implementing new cybersecurity measures or procedures.
• Applying patches.
• Developing and deploying software and hardware changes.
• Modifying existing configurations.

A cross-functional DevSecOps team typically identifies the best way to close these security gaps.

Vulnerabilities are constantly uncovered and exploited by attackers to gain access to applications, systems and networks. By regularly assessing and managing vulnerability threats, organizations can reduce the likelihood of attacks such as data breaches, malware and DDoS.

Vulnerability assessment tools scan the IT environment and detect flaws. They also report on detected defects, analyzing their impact and providing a risk rating based on the severity of the issue. However, they can’t differentiate between vulnerabilities that hackers can use to breach systems and those that are not yet exploitable (assuming that an attack is successful). For this reason, it’s important to perform penetration testing alongside a VA test to ensure that all vulnerabilities are identified. This includes black box and grey box testing techniques outside the network.