What is the process of testing your cloud access to determine whether there is any vulnerability that an attacker could exploit?

Unpatched software, misconfigured systems, and other weaknesses can create devastating implications for your organization.

A single successful breach into your environment, for example, a successful phishing attempt that lands ransomware on one of your servers, could cost your business hundreds of thousands of dollars in remediation and recovery expenses; extended downtime that can last days or longer; lost customers and a drop in sales and revenue; brand and reputational damage; and in some cases, a successful attack can shut down your business altogether.

With about 9,000 recorded breaches in the past 10 years, your organization is increasingly vulnerable to a cyber attack. And although more than 30% of organizations say they’ve had a cyber attack on their operational infrastructure, more than 62% around the world aren’t confident they’re ready to deal with an attack.

While attackers are constantly looking for ways to exploit weaknesses and get into your system, malware and phishing schemes are common attack methods. The average cost of a malware attack in the past two years is more than $2 million and ransomware continues to be an increasing threat for organizations of all sizes.

On average, a business becomes a victim to ransomware every 13 seconds. Phishing emails are the most effective way in, with 91% of attacks starting with phishing. In the past year, 76% of businesses said they had been targeted by a phishing attack.

Add to these exploit vectors the volume and diversity of asset types and it is increasingly more challenging for security teams to adapt and remediate every vulnerability that could affect your organization.

That’s why today’s most successful vulnerability assessment programs rely on tools and resources that facilitate continuous asset discovery and vulnerability monitoring, along with processes to prioritize threats based on actual risk to your organization.

Benefits of a vulnerability assessment program

Vulnerability assessment helps you discover and analyze weaknesses within your attack surface to reduce the chance attackers can exploit your network and gain unauthorized access to your data.

From malware to weak passwords and everything in between, threats to organizations of all sizes continue to increase, as does the cost to stop and fix and attack once it’s underway. That’s why it’s increasingly important to adopt a vulnerability assessment program to better understand your Cyber Exposure and keep your organization safe.

If you’re still considering whether or not a vulnerability assessment program is right for you, here are a few benefits to consider:

Discover Vulnerabilities

A vulnerability assessment program can help you discover all of your vulnerabilities including software flaws, missing patches, malware, and misconfigurations, so you can stay a step ahead of mitigate them before attackers infiltrate your attack surface.

Map Your Assets

By discovering all the assets in your organization, you can create a detailed map of your entire attack surface.

Maintain an Up-to-Date Asset Inventory

Asset discovery enables you to create an inventory of all your assets, even those that only occasionally connect to your network and those that are short-lived.

Understand Your Cyber Risks

Your vulnerability assessment program should give you insight into all of your assets and all of your vulnerabilities so you can determine your cyber risks and make solid business and security decisions to mitigate those risks. This will also help you build a stronger security posture.

Audit Patching

A vulnerability assessment program can help you better manage your patching plans, including insight into any configuration changes, so you can better plan for and evaluate the success of your remediation strategies.

Better Communication of Critical Information

Reporting on your vulnerability assessments can help you keep key stakeholders, from management to clients informed about all vulnerabilities and misconfiguration issues.

Choosing a vulnerability assessment solution that enhances your vulnerability management program

While your organization will have unique needs when it comes to selecting a vulnerability assessment solution, there are some core considerations applicable across industries. Here are four things to consider when evaluating a vulnerability assessment solution:

1. When it comes to asset discovery and vulnerability assessment, your solution should offer a wide range of coverage including continuous asset discovery and complete visibility into your attack surface.

Do you provide passive network monitors to continuously discover assets?

Do you provide agents that work with both cloud-based and on-premise deployments?

Do you provide cloud connectors for live visibility into Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments?

2. Asset assessment in today’s modern IT environment is more than just running a scan.

   Questions to ask your vendor:

Do your container image scans consider layer hierarchy to reduce false positives?

Do you provide passive monitoring for OT and IoT vulnerability detection?

Has your research team discovered any Zero-day vulnerabilities in the last 12 months? If yes, how many?

3. With an array of data collection tools in your comprehensive vulnerability assessment program, teams often struggle with vulnerability data overload. What do you do with all the information you gather? Which vulnerabilities are likely to have the greatest real-world impact on your organization and may be exploited in the near future? How do you prioritize remediation?

   A vulnerability assessment solution that leverages machine learning can help your team get a handle on data so you can uncover blind spots and hidden patterns to better assess future threats to your organization.

Does your vulnerability scoring primarily look at historical data such as the existence of exploits or does it incorporate real-time intelligence about current threats?

Does your vulnerability scoring leverage machine learning?

What about automated asset criticality scoring?

4. Your vulnerability assessment solution should have a simple and straightforward pricing and licensing model and can scale as your organization grows and changes.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into how to choose the best vulnerability assessment solution for your organization, check out Gartner’s Guide to Choosing a Vulnerability Assessment Solution.

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App SecurityEssentials

A vulnerability assessment is a systematic review of security weaknesses in an information system. It evaluates if the system is susceptible to any known vulnerabilities, assigns severity levels to those vulnerabilities, and recommends remediation or mitigation, if and whenever needed.

Examples of threats that can be prevented by vulnerability assessment include:

1. SQL injection, XSS and other code injection attacks.
2. Escalation of privileges due to faulty authentication mechanisms.
3. Insecure defaults – software that ships with insecure settings, such as a guessable admin passwords.

There are several types of vulnerability assessments. These include:

1. Host assessment – The assessment of critical servers, which may be vulnerable to attacks if not adequately tested or not generated from a tested machine image.
2. Network and wireless assessment – The assessment of policies and practices to prevent unauthorized access to private or public networks and network-accessible resources.
3. Database assessment – The assessment of databases or big data systems for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, identifying rogue databases or insecure dev/test environments, and classifying sensitive data across an organization’s infrastructure.
4. Application scans – The identifying of security vulnerabilities in web applications and their source code by automated scans on the front-end or static/dynamic analysis of source code.

This is part of an extensive series of guides about [open source]

Vulnerability assessment: Security scanning process

The security scanning process consists of four steps: testing, analysis, assessment and remediation.

1. Vulnerability identification (testing)

The objective of this step is to draft a comprehensive list of an application’s vulnerabilities. Security analysts test the security health of applications, servers or other systems by scanning them with automated tools, or testing and evaluating them manually. Analysts also rely on vulnerability databases, vendor vulnerability announcements, asset management systems and threat intelligence feeds to identify security weaknesses.

2. Vulnerability analysis

The objective of this step is to identify the source and root cause of the vulnerabilities identified in step one.

It involves the identification of system components responsible for each vulnerability, and the root cause of the vulnerability. For example, the root cause of a vulnerability could be an old version of an open source library. This provides a clear path for remediation – upgrading the library.

3. Risk assessment

The objective of this step is the prioritizing of vulnerabilities. It involves security analysts assigning a rank or severity score to each vulnerability, based on such factors as:

1. Which systems are affected.
2. What data is at risk.
3. Which business functions are at risk.
4. Ease of attack or compromise.
5. Severity of an attack.
6. Potential damage as a result of the vulnerability.

4. Remediation

The objective of this step is the closing of security gaps. It’s typically a joint effort by security staff, development and operations teams, who determine the most effective path for remediation or mitigation of each vulnerability.

Specific remediation steps might include:

1. Introduction of new security procedures, measures or tools.
2. The updating of operational or configuration changes.
3. Development and implementation of a vulnerability patch.

Vulnerability assessment cannot be a one-off activity. To be effective, organizations must operationalize this process and repeat it at regular intervals. It is also critical to foster cooperation between security, operation and development teams – a process known as DevSecOps.

Vulnerability assessment tools are designed to automatically scan for new and existing threats that can target your application. Types of tools include:

1. Web application scanners that test for and simulate known attack patterns.
2. Protocol scanners that search for vulnerable protocols, ports and network services.
3. Network scanners that help visualize networks and discover warning signals like stray IP addresses, spoofed packets and suspicious packet generation from a single IP address.

It is a best practice to schedule regular, automated scans of all critical IT systems. The results of these scans should feed into the organization’s ongoing vulnerability assessment process.

Vulnerability assessment and WAF

Imperva’s web application firewall helps protect against application vulnerabilities in several ways:

1. As a gateway for all incoming traffic, it can proactively filter out malicious visitors and requests, such as SQL injections and XSS attacks. This eliminates the risk of data exposure to malicious actors.
2. It can perform virtual-patching — the auto-applying of a patch for a newly discovered vulnerability at the network edge, giving developers and IT teams the opportunity to safely deploy a new patch on the application without concern.
3. Our WAF provides a view of security events. Attack Analytics helps contextualize attacks and expose overarching threats, (e.g., showing thousands of seemingly unrelated attacks as part of one big attack campaign).
4. Our WAF integrates with all leading SIEM platforms to provide you with a clear view of the threats you’re facing and help you prepare for new attacks.

See Our Additional Guides on Key Open Source Topics

Together with our content partners, we have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of open source.

Openshift Container Platform

Authored by NetApp

Open Source Vulnerabilities

Authored by Mend

Open Source Security

Authored by Mend