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What is Vulnerabilty Assessment? Why is it important?

A vulnerability assessment is the process to classifying, identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities in computer systems, applications and network infrastructures. Vulnerability assessments also provide an organization with the necessary awareness, knowledge and risk backgrounds to understand and react to threats to its environment. Vulnerability assessment is a process of identifying risks or vulnerabilities in computer systems, hardware, networks, applications and other parts of the ecosystem.

These assessments are very important. They provide the required information about the incident to security and response teams. For further helps them in analyzing or prioritizing risks of potential remediation. Vulnerability assessments are a vital part of IT risk management lifecycles. It helps in protecting systems and data from unauthorized access or breaches. The security professionals use vulnerability scanner tools to identify threats or flaws within the organization’s infrastructure that represents potential risks.

Why Vulnerability Assessment is important?

A vulnerability assessment provides an organization with details for any security weaknesses in its environment. It also provides direction on how to assess the risks associated with those weaknesses.  With the increasing cyber-attacks and online threats, it is most important to have a constant check on the security loopholes that could become a pathway for hackers. Vulnerability assessments allow security teams for applies a comprehensive and clear approach to identify and resolve security threats and risks in the IT infrastructure.

It helps for identifying threats and weaknesses at the earliest time possible and work on remediation actions to close any gaps present in the infrastructure. Vulnerability Assessment also plays a vital role that ensuring an organization meets cyber-security compliance and guidelines of HIPAA and PCI DSS.

A vulnerability assessment involves many methods, tools and scanners to find grey areas in a system and network. The type of vulnerability assessment depends on how well the weakness in the given systems is discovered.

Types of vulnerability assessments

Vulnerability assessments discover for different types of system/network vulnerabilities. That means the assessment process includes by using a variety of tools, scanners and methodologies to identify vulnerabilities, threats and risks. Some of the different types of vulnerability assessment scans such as:

Host-based Scans

Host-based scans involve detailed examinations of processes, ports, and services. These scans are used to find vulnerabilities in servers and network hosts. Host-based scans also provide great visibility into the configuration settings and patch history of systems.

Network-based Scans

These scans help in identifying possible network security attacks. Just like other scans, it also involves several methods but helps to reduce the potential risks for the vulnerable systems on wired and wireless networks.

Wireless Network Scans

Wireless network scans are another type of assessment that works around a wireless system and helps in validating the security of a company’s network.

Database Scans

Database scans are most important to find pain points in the database and fix them before they become known to cybercriminals. These scans help the security team to take proper measures to avoid SQL injection attacks and others.

Advantages of Vulnerability Assessment

Vulnerability Assessment brings the lot of benefits to the companies. They analyze the risk of future cyber-attacks and help the companies to come up with proper remediation plans.

Here are various advantages of Vulnerability assessment:

• Scan networks for known security exposures before they come in the attacker’s sight.
• You can also create an inventory of all devices in a company for planning proper up-gradation and future assessments.
• They create an inventory of all the devices in the network along with their vulnerabilities, purpose and system information.
• It makes easier to define the level of risk exists on the network.
• Establish a business risk/benefit curve and optimize security expenses.

Disadvantages of Vulnerability Assessment

Vulnerability assessment indeed has various advantages such as:

False Positives

A high rate of false positives is another disadvantage for vulnerability assessment. A vulnerability scanner only detects threats that have been previously discovered. Furthermore, unless updated your scanner tool for almost every weakness, which is nigh impossible, it isn’t exactly capable for preventing any new attacks.

Software Program to Discover Flaws

Vulnerability scanning usually makes use for the software program that identifies security flaws, based upon a preset database of all the flaws currently known. The scanner then tests the system by sending out remote threats to ensure that the system is capable of saving itself against major security threats. Sometimes, the network administrators have no option rather than to depend on these software’s outcomes.