Vulnerability Assessment: All You Need to Know

In today’s global world, the cyber security concerns are confronting a wide range of organizations. The costs incurred by a data breach can be devastating for any business. Despite the boundless actions to control cyber security risks and real advances in IT security innovation and practices, the quantity of cyber security issues debilitating organizations has really grown in the past few years. The vulnerabilities of today’s cyber security are not the vulnerabilities of yesterday. They will proceed to develop and change as time advances. That is the reason it’s important that organizations remain avant-garde with regard to conceivable dangers to the security of their IT frameworks and data.

Vulnerability Assessment

Identity theft is one such threat that we all have to take seriously, and it’s a big part of any network administrator’s job description. Any network computer is potentially vulnerable and any network professional managing the corporate or commercial network needs to know the weak points of the network so that they can harden them.

We all know that networks are vulnerable, but we don’t know where and how, that’s where Vulnerability Assessments come in.

Vulnerability Assessment is a comprehensive check of physical weaknesses in computers, in networks as well as on the work practices and procedure. It identifies potential risks and threats and develops strategies for dealing with it. We have all seen the headlines of high profile hacks, involving the loss of sensitive or commercial data that is why security professionals need to look at a network from the outside, see how the attackers see it, learn its strength, learn its weaknesses, and then plug the gaps.

Questions to ask when determining your Security Vulnerabilities

• Is your off-site location a secure place to store and backup your data?
• How precisely is your data in the cloud, being shielded from cloud vulnerabilities?
• What sort of system security do you need to figure out who can access, modify, or erase data within your organization?
• What sort of antivirus is being used? Are the licenses current? Is it running as regularly as required?
• In the event of a vulnerability being exploited, do you have a data recovery plan?

Need for Vulnerability Management:

The Rising Danger of Cyber Attacks

Cyber threats are expanding in number and advancement, in the past 10 years the most reported cyber-attacks were malicious code, Trojans and advanced worms, botnets, DNS attacks, and spam sites. But today cyber criminals are challenging the world with new malware such as bitcoin wallet stealers, ransomware, and POS assaults, to give some examples.

Transformation in Information Security Requirements

The Data security requirements are changing at a lightning speed, as the Hackers are relentless and finding new techniques to penetrate malware in the system. This makes the organizations to face complex challenges in the process of preparing for information security incidents.

Traditional Security Solutions are Ineffective for Long-term

Security solutions such as (intrusion detection systems, antivirus, encryption, prevention systems, patching, etc.) are still a key control for combatting today’s known attacks. As Intruders find new ways of avoiding such controls, the effectiveness of such solutions diminishes over time.

Gaps in Finding the Incidents

Organizations frequently do not have the capacity to identify data security occurrences because of essentially unavoidable gaps in detecting the incidents in their infrastructure.

Functions of Vulnerability Assessment

Inform

Vulnerability Assessment can provide an information advantage to organizations, notifying them of significant exposure, patching, or exploitation developments.

Prioritize

Vulnerability ratings and analysis assist organizations in prioritization and tailoring patching schedules based on the greatest threats to their organization, sector, and geographic region. 

Monitor

Ongoing monitoring of the threat environment allows organizations to adjust patching and mitigation plans to respond to real-world changes.

If you are looking for a partner to do your vulnerability management and assessment, we at Cymune follow a complete, established, and highly effective methodology to help organizations across various verticals address their vulnerabilities and improve their security posture.

We will be writing Part II of this article to discuss more about penetration testing and how is it different from vulnerability assessment and penetration testing and when to use what, until then Stay tuned…