Vulnerability Assessment Scanning: Explaining the Step-wise Procedure
Considering the volatile nature of the modern-day threat environment, it has become quite inevitably essential to perform vulnerability assessment more often and regularly on a regular basis. It is important to carry out a vulnerability assessment regularly so that the user-critical data and networks & systems aren’t exposed to any kind of cyberattacks. As per an online report, the cost of a data breach in 2019 was $3.92 million, so just imagine the loss a company bears when it fails to carry out vulnerability assessment for its digital assets.
What Exactly is Vulnerability Assessment?
Vulnerability assessment refers to the process of identifying the key vulnerabilities in the user network, systems & hardware and proceeding towards procedures for carrying out remediation. The information gained from vulnerability testing can be used by the IT security teams for assessing and enhancing the processes of mitigation and prevention.
A vulnerability assessment identifies the systems that most vulnerable and critical on the user network and scheduling the remediation process against the high-risk vulnerabilities that can affect the most critical systems in the network.
Vulnerability assessment helps the users to have a proactive approach towards cybersecurity and understand the awareness of cyber risks for their organizations.
Benefits of Vulnerability Assessment
Following are the benefits that users receive when a vulnerability assessment is performed–
- When the user carries out vulnerability assessment on a regular basis, he can identify any shortcomings in his security defense by himself, rather exposing these to any attacker
- A vulnerability assessment helps the users with a complete picture of his security posture and informing the user about the data that is most likely to be vulnerable in their systems
- A vulnerability assessment also offers more detailed and actionable information as compared to a breach-and-attack (BAS) simulation tool. The BAS tool automates the process of running simulated attacks on the user system for testing the deployed security posture in the user systems
Steps Involved in Vulnerability Assessment
Essentially, five steps are followed for performing a vulnerability assessment scanning to help the users allocate their security resources with the highest degree of efficiency.
- Performing Initial Assessments
The user needs to identify all his assets and also set the risk and critical value for all his devices. The user needs to identify the importance of a particular device present on his network. It is also important for the user to understand if his devices are accessible by any other member of his company.
- Gaining System Information
Now the user needs to gather information about his systems before he conducts vulnerability assessment scanning. The user needs to have an understanding of the approved drivers and software along with the basic configuration of each device.
- Performing Vulnerability Scanning
Now, once the system information is gathered, the user needs to use a scanning tool for achieving the desired outcomes. Before carrying out the vulnerability scan, the user needs to look for any compliance requirements based on his company’s business and determine the best time for performing the vulnerability scanning.
- Generating a Vulnerability Assessment Report
This is the most important step when in the vulnerability assessment procedure. The users need to focus heavily and add a look to add additional values to the recommendations. To extract real value out of the final generated report, the user needs to add recommendations based on his initially-defined assessment goals. The user also needs to add the risk mitigation techniques based on the criticalness of his assets and their results.
- Preparing a Remediation Process
Once the scan results are properly documented with priorities defined for each device, the user needs to create a remediation process. The remediation process needs to clearly define the degree of severity and urgency for remediating each identified vulnerability.
Conclusion
Attackers are always on the go when it comes to taking advantage of vulnerabilities. As long as the user system contains the exploits, the user needs to identify a process for constantly searching and remediating his vulnerabilities. A continuous vulnerability scanning is an indispensable component of an effective cybersecurity plan.
If you’re looking to secure your website and web applications, then ESDS VTMScan is an all-in-one vulnerability scanner equipped with the latest scanning features to provide users with key vulnerability reports.
Stay alert – hackers may be spying on you!
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