Security
3 min read
Each day there are more and more cyber attacks and threats occurring, with those looking to exploit your IT systems finding various different methods to infiltrate your IT infrastructure. This means it's more vital than ever that you limit the vulnerabilities of your IT infrastructure and guarantee its security. In regards to this, a viable solution available to you is vulnerability assessment. Vulnerability assessment involves identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing potential security vulnerabilities or weaknesses within a system, network, application, or any IT environment. The practice puts excessive weight on the identification of weaknesses through a comprehensive and systematic approach. This is conducted by scanning tools that actively scan various components of an IT system, to ensure that no vulnerabilities are missed and that you as the organization can act promptly to resolve these vulnerabilities.
Therefore to deepen your understanding of the process of vulnerability management, within this article, we will outline what vulnerability management is and how it works.
Contents
What is Vulnerability Assessment?
Vulnerability assessment entails a structured approach to finding, assessing, and prioritizing potential security weaknesses or vulnerabilities within IT environments, including systems, networks, and applications. The key goal of vulnerability assessment is to preemptively detect and address potential security threats before malicious individuals can exploit them.
What is Vulnerabilty Assessment as a Service (VAaaS)?
Vulnerability Assessment as a Service (VAaaS) is a security offering supplied by specialized service providers, such as Logit.io to execute assessments of an organization's systems, networks, applications, or IT infrastructure for potential vulnerabilities. This service requires tools, methodologies, and expert analysis to find and prioritize security weaknesses within an organization's digital environment.
Vulnerability Assessment: How it works
The primary function of vulnerability assessment is to discover and highlight potential weaknesses or vulnerabilities to allow you to rectify these issues quickly before malicious attackers can exploit them. To deepen your knowledge of the practice and its involvement, we have broken it down into a few key steps.
1. Scanning and Discovery: In the first stage, an assessment is conducted by utilizing scanning tools to examine the system or network, inspecting multiple elements such as software versions, configurations, network connections, etc.
2. Comparison against Known Vulnerabilities: The elements that have been scanned are now compared against databases of known vulnerabilities. These databases contain information regarding previously identified security weaknesses, software bugs, misconfigurations, or other issues that could be exploited.
3. Vulnerability Detection: The scanning tools highlight potential weaknesses by finding patterns, signatures, or anomalies within the system or network. For example, these tools could highlight unpatched software, misconfigured settings, open ports, weak passwords, or other potential security risks.
4. Categorization and Security Assessment: The highlighted vulnerabilities are categorized and classified based on their severity and potential impact. This helps prioritize the vulnerabilities for mitigation, focusing efforts on the most critical security risks.
5. Reporting and Recommendations: For mitigation and remediation the assessment results are compiled into a detailed report outlining the identified vulnerabilities, their severity, and recommendations. This report helps in taking essential actions to address the identified security weaknesses.
6. Continuous Monitoring: Vulnerability assessment is a continual process. Systems and networks are continuously monitored to find new vulnerabilities that may arise due to system changes, new software, or evolving threat landscapes.
Vulnerabilty Assessment as a Service (VAaaS): Use Cases
You may already be familiar with a few common use cases of a vulnerability assessment as a service tool. However, there is an extensive array of uses for organizations of all sizes, that you may be unaware of. So, for you to fully understand the vast capabilities of this solution, we have outlined some of the best use cases of a VAaaS tool.
To begin with, if you’re part of a large organisation or enterprise, it can be particularly challenging to maintain the security of your IT infrastructure. This is purely due to the vast amounts of networks, systems, and individual components that will all need to be regularly monitored and assessed for potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Large organizations often use VAaaS to constantly analyze their complex networks, systems, and applications. This helps in identifying vulnerabilities, ensuring compliance, and maintaining a strong security posture against potential cyber threats.
Another typical use case of vulnerability assessment as a service solution is for cloud security. Over the past few years, there has been a continual shift to cloud-based infrastructure. Like any other IT infrastructure, this needs to be secure and therefore regularly assessed for weaknesses. VAaaS is vital for assessing the security of cloud services, ensuring that cloud-based applications and data are protected from potential vulnerabilities and threats.
Continuing with another use case of a vulnerability assessment as a service tool, a great example is for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A common issue for smaller organisations is that they do not have the financial and human resources to conduct additional monitoring and assessments of their IT infrastructure. However, VAaaS is beneficial for SMEs that lack the resources or expertise for an in-house security team. This is because it presents a cost-effective solution to mitigate and assess potential vulnerabilities in their IT infrastructure.
Our final use case that makes our list for Vulnerability Assessment as a Service is for remote work and network security. With more and more organisations moving to remote working environments or hybrid models, meaning less time spent in the office. This means that it’s vital to guarantee the security of remote network connections and systems, and VAaaS can help assess this. It aids in finding vulnerabilities within the remote network infrastructure, which is key for ensuring secure connections between remote employees and the central network.
If you’ve enjoyed this article why not read What is CMMC? or Why Log Management is Important for IT Security?