Benefits of Vulnerability Assessment – A Detailed Guide

We all know that vulnerability assessment is very important nowadays, and that’s why most of the companies use this assessment. Whether the company is small or it is a large IT sector, everyone needs to protect their company from cyberattacks, especially targeted ones that try to exploit a vulnerability in your applications.

Nowadays, cyberattacks are widespread, thus every year, each company gets exposed to nearly 247 vulnerabilities. Moreover, in previous years the UK local government has encountered nearly 19.5 million cyberattacks.

That’s the reason, for which all the IT sectors need to increase all its sources because if the previous years were good for hackers, then the upcoming years were going to be the worst years for every company.

To encounter new sudden threats, all the companies need to equip themselves very well as per their requirements. Well, an increase in cyberattacks may result in huge losses and corrupted data.

And this sort of outcome will affect not just short term revenue loss but also cause a loss in customer confidence to do business with you in the future and hence longer-term brand erosion and more revenue loss too.

What is Vulnerability Assessment?

Vulnerability assessment is a method by which you can identify various threats in the computer system. Well, a vulnerability assessment gets mentioned along with penetration testing, as they are classified in the same groups though there are some specific differences in the engagement model.

A vulnerability assessment is very important for every type of company as this assessment provides you with getting visibility of your risks. Without visibility of risk first, taking steps to mitigate them is not effective. 

Hackers try to do targeted attacks and hence organizations should also prioritize their security measures by first getting visibility of risk by doing continuous vulnerability assessments for all your digital assets.

Every known vulnerability is assigned by Common Vulnerabilities and Disclosures, and all the given list is easily accessible for every hacker, and later they can use malware purchased on the Dar Web, begin DDoS, or SQL injections assaults on unprotected companies or applications. 

The intent of this is to provide a common platform and severity levels for the organization to take action, but the same data can also be used by hackers to discover and then target attacks.

Why is Vulnerability Assessment Required?

Well, as we described above that vulnerability assessment attempts to identify every kind of threat in your digital assets, and then it classifies them as per CVE standards.

As we mentioned earlier that nowadays, the risk of cyberattacks had increased rapidly, and to minimize the threats and identify and fix them before hackers do and exploit them.

A attack can have impact on the revenue and  the reputation of the company as the customer could lose faith in the company. The reason for loss of customer faith is mostly not because of an incident but due to how the company reacts and communicates after the incident.  So a vulnerability assessment though may not fool proof your defence it allows you to communicate clearly and transparently to your customer in case a incident happens and this builds a lot of trust.

Therefore the vulnerability testing is required as it will not justmitigate the risk of the company from  cyberattacks, it will also help you understand and also formulate a honest, data driven actionable communication to all stake holders in case a breach happens.

Vulnerability assessment also provides the company with extensive knowledge regarding its digital assets, safety flaws, and general risk, decreasing the possibility that a cybercriminal will violate its systems and intercept the company.

Benefits of Regular Vulnerability Assessments

The regular vulnerability assessments help the company so that it can lower the risk of further cyberattacks. This also requires special tools and expertise to execute

Therefore, you may require a security provider along with vulnerability assessment training and the abilities to achieve the variations that are allowed by the assessment method.

One such security solution provider could be Indusface as it gives the ability to do assessments frequently as well in-depth with manual penetration testing on-demand and also fix them with their managed firewall solutions.

Enterprise security providers have automated vulnerability scanning tools that use the Self Learning and Global Threat Intelligence Database to learn the attack postures from previous attacks and ensures vulnerabilities are identified effectively.

Most of the essential factors are obtaining a better knowledge of the threats that a company generally faces, the flaws in the systems, and the methods to counter appropriately.

The tactics like this cannot be dropped for the last-minute or after you have already encountered a data breach. Hence, a vulnerability assessment is a proactive method for sustaining and preserving the sincerity of your whole operation and the company.

The regular vulnerability management does various benefits as this assessment also performs an essential role in assuring that a company reaches a cybersecurity agreement and also gets the guidelines of HIPAA and PCI DSS.

Apart from this, the vulnerability assessment includes multiple techniques, tools, and scanners to detect blind spot areas in a system or network. While the different types of vulnerability assessments based on how well the weakness in the given systems is determined.

Phases of Vulnerability Assessment

Along with different regular benefits, vulnerability assessment does have some phases also that help in determining the threats. Thus, there are a total of 3 phases that also have different names as per their performance.

In the first phase, the vulnerability scans are performed and provide you with discovery of the assets and services running along with its risk based on CVE score.

Next, we have the second phase, which deals with managing the vulnerability.  There has to be a cadence established on how frequently you do it and also report and assign responsibility and workflow rules to team members to act on it.

The third phaseis putting controls in place to have clear metrics , trackability of what is fixed and what cannot be fixed and taking incremental steps to adapt and address them iteratively.

It deals with the optimizing phase of a vulnerability assessment program; the metrics that are described in the earlier stages are targeted for development and growth. Thus, optimizing every parameter will guarantee that the vulnerability assessment program continuously decreases the risk of attack for  the company and increase response in case it still happens with clear communication strategy and execution plan to fix them both reactively and proactively.

In short, the vulnerability assessment has some regular benefits along with various phases that help the whole operation to get completed successfully.

1.Information Gathering about the systems

To identify the various threats, the first thing that you have to gathers a lot of information about the system. Thus every company that is pursuing to perform the vulnerability assessment then they must collect all the possible information regarding the system or the network so that it will be easy for them to carry out the operation thoroughly, acquiring as much data regarding the IT environment, for example, information regarding Networks, IP Address, Operating System version, and many more.  This type of information is relevant to all the three types of ranges, like the Black Box Testing, Grey Box Testing, and White Box Testing.

2. Review results & Enumeration

Once the company collects all the information regarding the IT sector, then they have to review the results and then enumerate them properly. It will examine the recognized vulnerabilities to the device, and then they have to plan a proper strategy for penetrating the network and systems. The vulnerabilities are gaps in the specifications, layout, and implementation, which most of the attackers aim to exploit for compromising the system. So, reviewing should be done properly, as its one of the most important grades of the operation.

3. Detecting Actual vulnerabilities & Reporting

The last step is to detect the actual vulnerability, and after proper examination, it has to be reported to the administrator for further procedures. Well, in the process of vulnerability detection, there are vulnerability scanners that are being used in operation, as it will scan the IT environment and will recognize the vulnerabilities, and then they will classify them subsequently.

Once the detection gets over, the whole matter is then reported to the administration so that they carry out further steps and procedures to mitigate and fix the security holes present.

In short, a vulnerability testing is the most necessary security measure nowadays that every SMBs and IT companies should carry out, as the rate of cyberattacks are rapidly increasing day by day, which is not a good sign. So every company should be prepared according to their environment so that they can always be ready to face sudden threats.

Moreover, there are plenty of web application vulnerabilities that are progressing dramatically, but most of them occur from improper or none data validation. Therefore most of the current strategies are based on the Impaired Mode vulnerability model, which cannot manage inter-module vulnerabilities, though we have figured all the possible ways and everything about the vulnerability assessment.

Security holes are the natural pathways that allow hackers to get access to IT systems and their applications; that’s why every company must recognize and eliminate all the weaknesses before they can be misused. Thus a complete vulnerability assessment simultaneously with a control program can help every company to increase the security of their systems software.

A vulnerability assessment is usually automated to cover a wide variety of unpatched vulnerabilities, and penetration testing commonly blends automated and manual methods to help examiners to investigate more regarding the vulnerabilities and exploit them to obtain access to the network in a controlled environment.