Vulnerability Assessment Solution | enterprise.comodo.com

With cyberattacks widespread, companies are exposed to vulnerabilities. To equip themselves against the cyberattacks, companies need to undergo vulnerability assessment to safeguard against huge losses. Where you want to ensure the security safety of your organization anytime, you need to do continuous evaluation through security audits. With a vulnerability assessment, you can identify and review security weaknesses in the information system of the organization. It helps assigns severity levels if the system is affected by any vulnerabilities.

A vulnerability assessment is carried out by the IT security team within the company or outsourced to a third party. Some of the threats you can prevent through this assessment are injection attacks like XSS, SQL, etc., faulty authentication mechanisms, and insecure defaults.

Know the Four Steps of Vulnerability Assessment Process

Being the foundational element, a vulnerability assessment helps apply appropriate security controls in place. There are four steps involved in performing a vulnerability assessment process.

Identification

The objective is to understand the necessity of the devices and the vulnerabilities associated with them on your network. Security analysts use automated tools to evaluate the security health of servers, applications and other systems. Using the tools, they scan, evaluate and test them manually. They determine the risk using various factors such as whether the particular device is connected to the Internet through external or internal IP addresses, whether the permissions given are high-level or low-level, for what the device is used in business processes, etc.

To determine security weaknesses, the analysts depend on vendor vulnerability announcements, vulnerability databases, threat intelligence feeds and asset management systems.

Analysis

With this step, the source and cause of the vulnerabilities is identified. By identifying the system components accountable for the risk will offer a vulnerability assessment solution or remediation. For instance, a vulnerability may be due to the outdated open source library, which needs to be upgraded as a remediation. You can identify the risk by performing authenticated vulnerability scans adhering to specific compliance laws.

Risk Assessment

This involves prioritizing of risks by allotting a severity or rank score to each vulnerability depending on the following aspects such as affected systems, vulnerable data, business functions in danger, ease and severity of an attack, and possible damage owing to the vulnerability.

Remediation

You fix the glitches through this step and it is generally performed jointly by the development team, security staff and operation team. The vulnerability remediation steps include:

System updates and updating configuration changes

Initiation of new security tools, processes and measures

Developing the vulnerability patch and implementing it.

Get to Know Vulnerability Assessment Solution Tools

You can easily and mechanically scan the threats that can attack your application using the following tools.

1. Protocol scanners to check vulnerable protocols, network services and ports

2. Web application scanners to test and set of known attack patterns

3. Network scanners to assist envisage networks and detect warning signals such as spoofed packets, stray IP addresses, and doubtful packet generation.

The above vulnerability assessment solution steps and tools help consistent and automatic scans of your IT systems.