Vulnerability assessments are critical for ensuring your organization protects sensitive workloads and data. They provide visibility into your environment so you can quickly and effectively detect and resolve vulnerabilities to avoid costly cyberattacks.
The vulnerability assessment process typically involves identifying, evaluating and classifying cyber vulnerabilities in systems, digital assets and networks using a security tool that relies on threat intelligence and vulnerability databases.
Real-time Visibility
A lack of visibility and transparency in the supply chain can cost your business a lot. Knowing the whereabouts and estimated arrival time of everything in motion, from raw materials to machine parts, is critical. Without real-time visibility, you can’t quickly identify and remedy issues affecting your entire ecosystem.
Real-time visibility is live information that tracks a shipment throughout its lifecycle, allowing all stakeholders to monitor and take action. This can help you reduce inventory costs, increase productivity and boost efficiency. It also gives customers peace of mind knowing their products are safe and sound, resulting in happier, repeat business.
The technology behind real-time visibility combines many systems that collect and analyze data from various sources, including GPS and telematics hardware, port operators and customs software. This data is then consolidated and analyzed using artificial intelligence or machine learning technology to provide a centralized location for all relevant stakeholders to access.
These tools can detect and alert users of potential issues such as equipment malfunctions, security breaches or weather-related delays. This allows them to react in the moment and minimize the impact of a disruption on the supply chain. Real-time visibility also makes it easier for IT teams to perform migration and modernization initiatives, as they can better understand how applications are interconnected and determine which ones will be affected by changes.
Prioritization
As mentioned above, organizations can reduce the risk of data breaches by identifying vulnerabilities in systems, applications and network devices that attackers could exploit to access sensitive information. However, this can only be done if you prioritize and assess vulnerabilities continuously.
These vulnerability assessment tools for businesses can identify and prioritize the risks of each vulnerability, forming a most-to-least critical rank order that helps determine where to focus security efforts. This helps to ensure that the most severe vulnerabilities are addressed first and that the highest risks are mitigated effectively.
This is why choosing the right vulnerability assessment tools for your organization is essential. You want to find an agency that comprehensively covers all your IT assets and identifies known and unknown vulnerabilities. Look for a solution that allows you to run scans easily, provides best-in-class customer support, and generates thorough, actionable reports.
It’s also important to have an ongoing vulnerability assessment process that includes a combination of network-based scanning, examining host systems on the wired and wireless networks; application scanning, looking for weaknesses in web apps and networks; and penetration testing. A strong assessment process should foster collaboration between security, operations and development teams — or DevSecOps — to promote cooperation and enable the fastest remediation of vulnerabilities found.
Timely Remediation
When vulnerabilities are identified, it’s important to prioritize them for remediation. However, most security teams need more resources to address all the flaws simultaneously. A vulnerability assessment tool can provide insight to identify critical weaknesses and mitigate risks quickly and efficiently.
A vulnerability assessment scans your infrastructure for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, identifying potential security weaknesses that cybercriminals could exploit to access sensitive information and damage your systems. Vulnerability assessments can include:
- Network scanners search for vulnerable computer services, ports and cybersecurity protocols.
- Application scans, which detect vulnerabilities in software.
- Wireless network scans that identify rogue access points.
The most effective vulnerability management tools offer a unified view of your organization’s attack surface and help you determine each vulnerability’s risk and severity. It combines data from multiple public and proprietary sources, including patch management, execution and runtime invocation data, Kubernetes configuration information, signals from running containers and more, to create a vulnerability score for each asset based on its treatability, fixability and impact.
A good tool will help you understand the impact of a vulnerability, allowing you to distinguish between those that need immediate attention and those where the cost to address outweighs the threat. Having the ability to see how attackers could use a vulnerability as a pivot point to reach more important assets or infrastructure also helps you understand where your time and energy should go.
Reduced Risk
Vulnerability assessment tools must be part of an ongoing process to identify, assess and remediate the vulnerabilities that threaten your organization’s systems and data. The best way to achieve this goal is by choosing a tool that provides real-time visibility into your attack surface and enables you to prioritize and manage risks for all your assets.
Vulnerabilities are a significant business for attackers. A successful exploit can earn attackers a variety of pay-offs depending on the type of vulnerability they target, including monetary payments and access to sensitive data. Attackers can quickly find and exploit vulnerabilities with various tools, including single-purpose vulnerability assessment tools.
A comprehensive vulnerability assessment program relies on a mix of tools designed to detect and report on a specific type of vulnerability. For example, network-based scans identify vulnerable systems on an organization’s wired or wireless networks; wireless scans search for malicious access points; application scanners test websites and mobile applications for known software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations; database scanners identify the weaknesses that might allow for database-specific attacks like SQL and NoSQL injection, and general vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in a database server. It is also important that your tools integrate to increase the breadth of coverage, decrease the amount of time required for assessments and reduce the risk of false positives.
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