What is the primary goal of vulnerability assessment and remediation?

Vulnerability assessment refers to the process of identifying risks and vulnerabilities in computer networks, systems, hardware, applications, and other parts of the IT ecosystem. Vulnerability assessments provide security teams and other stakeholders with the information they need to analyze and prioritize risks for potential remediation in the proper context.

Vulnerability assessments are a critical component of the vulnerability management and IT risk management lifecycles, helping protect systems and data from unauthorized access and data breaches.

Vulnerability assessments typically leverage tools like vulnerability scanners to identify threats and flaws within an organization's IT infrastructure that represents potential vulnerabilities or risk exposures.

Vulnerability assessments allow security teams to apply a consistent, comprehensive, and clear approach to identifying and resolving security threats and risks. This has several benefits to an organization:

• Early and consistent identification of threats and weaknesses in IT security

• Remediation actions to close any gaps and protect sensitive systems and information

• Meet cybersecurity compliance and regulatory needs for areas like HIPAA and PCI DSS

• Protect against data breaches and other unauthorized access

A vulnerability assessment explores a wide range of potential issues across multiple networks, systems, and other parts of your IT ecosystem, on-prem and cloud. It identifies weaknesses that need correction, including misconfigurations and policy non-compliance vulnerabilities that patching and maintenance alone may not address.

Most vulnerability assessments assign a risk to each threat. These risks can have a priority, urgency, and impact assigned to them, which makes it easier to focus on those that could create the most issues for an organization. This is an important part of vulnerability management, as your IT security team will have limited time and resources, and must concentrate on the areas that could cause the most damage to your business.

The information provided by a vulnerability assessment helps IT teams, as well as automated third-party tools (i.e. patch management), to prioritize vulnerabilities and chart the path for action, which often means remediation. However, sometimes organization choose to accept the continuance of the risk. For instance, if the uncovered vulnerability is of low potential impact and of low likelihood, but on the other hand, fixing it would require downtime or potential breaking of other systems, IT may determine the vulnerability risk is less than the risk posed to ongoing IT operations. This is how vulnerability assessments fall into an overarching IT risk management framework.

There are various ways to perform vulnerability assessments, but one of the most common is through automated vulnerability scanning software. These tools use databases of known vulnerabilities to identify potential flaws in your networks, apps, containers, systems, data, hardware, and more.

The vulnerability assessment tool will comprehensively scan every aspect of your technology. Once the scans are completed, the tool will report on all the issues discovered, and suggest actions to remove threats. The more full-featured tools may offer insight into the security and operational impact of remediating a risk, versus accepting the risk. Vulnerability scanning data may also be integrated into a SIEM along with other data for even more holistic threat analytics.

Vulnerability assessments and scans should be performed on a regular basis — IT environments are changing all the time (for instance, a software update or system configuration change could result in a new vulnerability), and new threats continue to emerge, so it’s essential to identify and address vulnerabilities quickly to limit cybersecurity risk.

Vulnerability scanning is only part of a vulnerability assessment — other processes, such as penetration testing, can identify different types of threats to IT in your organization. Penetration testing complements vulnerability scanning, and is useful for determining if a vulnerability can be acted on, and whether that action would cause damage, data loss, or other issues.

The most vital part of vulnerability assessment is a vulnerability scanning tool. This tool should be able to carry out various types of scans, such as:

• Credentialed and non-credentialed scans

• External vulnerability scans

• Internal vulnerability scans

• Environmental scans

When you’re choosing a vulnerability scanning tool, emphasize the following areas:

• Frequency of updates

• Quality and quantity of vulnerabilities, including minimizing false positives and false negatives. Elimination of false positives

• Actionability of results

• Integrations with other vulnerability management and IT security tools (patch management, SIEM, etc.)

Vulnerability assessments should always provide clear, actionable information on all identified threats, and the corrective actions that will be needed. This allows risk managers to prioritize fixes against the overall cyber risk profile of the organization. A good vulnerability assessment approach can significantly reduce your exposure to cyber threats, and boost your baseline of protection across your organization’s systems and data.

Behind every successful organization, within any industry, is an IT system. Everyone in the workforce, from top to bottom, utilizes this system's assets on a daily basis. Think about it.

Making quick internet searches, emailing potential clients, and storing data in the cloud, to give you an example, can't be done without an IT device.

However, everything comes with a price. Organizations that rely heavily on their IT assets are essentially opening the door for potential cyber breaches.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity threats are steadily increasing:

●       Cybersecurity breaches potentially cost corporate organizations, both local and global, $500 billion each year

●       Data breaches cost the average company over $3.5 billion

●       In 2019, Cybersecurity threats in the form of ransomware attacks on businesses grew over 300%

●       2% to 4% of emails contain some form of malware

●       Business-disrupting ransomware and network security attacks nearly doubled this year

●       There were over 9.9 billion recorded malware attacks last year alone

What is the most effective method of combating these risks? A vulnerability assessment.

Thankfully, every enterprise can use the vulnerability assessment approach to ensure the safety of their networks, systems, and critical data.

Importance of Vulnerability Assessment

A vulnerability assessment is a process that allows an organization to monitor and manage every potential breach or entry point in their systems, networks, and hardware. After all, it's impossible to fix the flaws you can't see, so it's important to identify each weakness first.

However, a vulnerability assessment goes beyond your regular penetration testing and vulnerability scan. It provides a clearer picture of your current security posture that includes all data in every device, some of which may be particularly vulnerable and require immediate attention.

Every analysis also yields a useful vulnerability assessment report, which serves as a diagnostic tool for assessing the "cyber health" of your organization. IT teams can use the gathered information to improve the current system further and take an active approach toward remediation.

To defend against each new, more dangerous risk, every enterprise needs to conduct vulnerability assessments regularly for the best results.

It might help to think of it as necessary maintenance. The resources you can potentially lose from an attack far outweigh the resources needed to maintain and improve your security.

Types of Vulnerability Assessments

Learning the different types of vulnerability assessments can give your IT teams insight on which ones to prioritize. This all depends on the structure of your organization and the industry you're in. By taking a more specific approach, it's easier to defend against a particular risk:

Host Assessment

Critical servers and computer systems potentially vulnerable to attacks can benefit from a host assessment. This check involves identifying the issues in the host using a vulnerability scanner and using host-based tools to load mediator software in the target system. Then, these tools will trace the event and report it to your security analyst.

This scan typically examines services and ports that are also visible to network-based scans. With that said, a host assessment provides greater visibility into a scanned system's patch history and configuration settings.

Network and Wireless Assessment

Network and wireless assessments are processes that check the practices and policies of your private and public networks. They help prevent issues like unauthorized access.

With the help of network security scanning tools, managers of network hosts can easily fix open ports in an IP address that can cause a potential future risk.

Database Assessment

An unprotected database can create numerous risks for any organization, so your IT systems can use a check-up now and again to:

●       Identify rogue databases

●       Find insecure test environments

●       Fix misconfigurations

●       Classify sensitive data

It can also spot other vulnerabilities like SQL injections, which are statements injected into a database by malicious users that can read and update sensitive data without authorization.

Application Scans

These vulnerability assessment scans are useful for finding threats in any web application. A scan involves fixing incorrect network configurations and identifying the security vulnerabilities in an organization's web applications (and their source code).

Many security teams use these automated scans regularly on the front-end of their source code. They can carry out both static and dynamic analysis to remove software vulnerabilities and every other risky article in your web application.

Every organization needs a different vulnerability assessment approach depending on their potential risks, but each one uses the same basic structure.

Vulnerability Identification (testing)

Every vulnerability assessment process starts by determining which networks and systems need the most attention. Identify the location of sensitive data in those systems and start testing the ones deemed most critical.

Then, conduct a vulnerability scan, either manually or with the help of tools, to filter out false positives and identify security flaws and vulnerabilities. Analysts rely on vulnerability databases and threat intelligence to find these security weaknesses.

The number of vulnerabilities can seem overwhelming, especially with the first assessment, but the third step (risk assessment) makes the process more manageable.

Vulnerability Analysis

After you identify vulnerabilities in your infrastructure, the next step is to find their source and root cause. Which device or system component is responsible for the vulnerability? For instance, the primary cause might be an outdated version of an open-source library, so the solution would be to update the library.

The more detailed an assessment vulnerability analysis, the more information your analysts can use to recommend the best remediation method.

Risk Assessment

The analysts will check all operating systems, protocols, ports, services, and applications to understand the present vulnerabilities in the environment. Next, they will take each vulnerability and categorize them in different severity levels depending on one's IT infrastructure. This process can involve a penetration testing component to gauge a system's defense.

By quantifying the vulnerability, enterprises have a clearer sense of the risk or level of urgency behind each flaw and the potential impact they cause.

Remediation

The main goal of a vulnerability assessment is to fix key flaws and identify the parts of your information system that hold the highest risk take priority. After using the right vulnerability assessment tool to identify each risk and ranking every one with penetration tests, your analysts may recommend the best plan of action, whether it's updating some IT assets or enhancing security procedures.

Attackers will always look for new ways to take advantage of your system's vulnerabilities, so vulnerability assessments aren't a one and done deal. Regular vulnerability assessment report creation is necessary to maintain the safety of one's assets.

Every device, application, and website on your network is a potential entry point for cyber attacks. Our proven vulnerability assessment approach uses streamlined tools to identify threats and make it easier to find the most suitable fix for each vulnerability.

As security professionals, Digital Defense can help you assess all of your risk factors and get you the results you need. Contact us at 888.273.1412 and get a quote today!