In today’s threat environment, it’s not just a good idea to conduct a cybersecurity vulnerability assessment, and to do so on a regular basis – it’s a core requirement for any organization that wants to protect critical data and ensure that its networks and systems aren’t exposed to cyberattacks.
THE IMPORTANCE OF VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT
Qodes Technologies provides deep insights on security deficiencies in an environment and helps to evaluate a system’s vulnerability to a specific threat and the evolving ones. Simply put, an organization can fully understand the security flaws, overall risk, and assets that are vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches. To stay protected and to counter surprise attacks, a thorough vulnerability assessment can fix the unattended security issues.
Basically, a vulnerability assessment applies various methods, tools, and scanners to find out grey areas, threats, and risks. Everything depends on how well the weakness in the given systems is discovered to attend to that specific need.
Find below different types of vulnerability assessment scans:
Network-based scans
Going by the name, it helps identify possible network security attacks. The scan helps zero-in the vulnerable systems on wired or wireless networks.
Host-based scans
Server workstations or other network hosts vulnerabilities are easily identified using these scans. In the process, ports and services are examined vigorously. It also provides excellent visibility into the configuration settings and patch history of scanned systems.
Wireless network scans
Wireless network infrastructure is scanned to identify vulnerabilities, it helps in validating a company’s network.
Application Scans
It is used to test websites to discover all known software vulnerabilities.
WHY VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENTS ARE IMPORTANT
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.
HOW VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENTS RELATE TO IT RISK AND VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT
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.