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.

The goal is to help organizations:

  • Identify threats and weaknesses in IT security early and consistently
  • Prioritize threats to determine which issues to address first
  • Close gaps and protect sensitive systems and information
  • Meet cybersecurity compliance and regulatory needs

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

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

Types of Vulnerability Assessments

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.

Host-based scan

  • Identifies vulnerabilities in systems, servers, containers, workstations, workloads, or other network hosts.
  • Is typically deployed as an agent that can scan monitored devices and other hosts to identify unauthorized activity, changes, or other system issues.
  • Offers enhanced visibility into system configuration and patch history.

Network and wireless assessment – The assessment of policies and practices to prevent unauthorized access to private or public networks and network-accessible resources. assesses an organization’s Wi-Fi connections to search for potential rogue access points (APs) and validate whether the network is configured securely.

Network-based scan

  • Identifies vulnerabilities that can be exploited in network security attacks.
  • Includes assessments of traditional networks as well as wireless networks.
  • Enforces existing network security controls and policies.

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.

Database scan

  • Identifies vulnerabilities within the database systems or servers.
  • Helps prevent database-specific attacks, such as SQL injections, and identify other vulnerabilities, such as escalated privileges and misconfigurations.

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.

  • Identifies vulnerabilities related to software applications, including the application architecture, source code, and database.
  • Identifies misconfigurations and other security weaknesses in web and network applications.

Vulnerability Assessment Benefits for  Organizations

Identifying Threats : Security weaknesses could be due to outdated software, misconfigurations, or lack of security controls. Without a vulnerability assessment, these issues could remain unnoticed, providing an open door for attackers to exploit.

Identifying security weaknesses allows you to take preemptive action to fix them before they can be used against you. It provides a clear picture of your security posture and helps you understand where your defenses may be lacking.

Prioritizing Threats: Not all vulnerabilities carry the same level of risk. Some may pose a minor threat, while others could lead to significant data breaches or system down times. A vulnerability assessment helps in prioritizing these threats based on their potential impact on your organization.

This prioritization is crucial in determining how resources should be allocated to address these vulnerabilities. It ensures that the most critical threats are dealt with first, thereby reducing the potential damage they could cause.

Closing Gaps to Protect Systems and Information: A primary goal of vulnerability assessments is to reduce attack surfaces. Vulnerability assessment involves identifying and minimizing all the possible points in an organization’s network—both internal and external—where unauthorized access can occur. This is vital for decreasing the likelihood and impact of security breaches.

Internally, the focus is on securing the organization’s own network and systems. This includes ensuring robust security protocols for servers, network devices, and end-user devices like laptops and smartphones. Regular updates, stringent access controls, and consistent monitoring are key strategies to mitigate risks from within the organization.

Externally, the goal is to safeguard public-facing elements like websites and external network connections. Continuous vulnerability assessments of these components are crucial to identify and address potential threats from external sources.

Meeting Cybersecurity Compliance and Regulatory Needs: Many organizations need to comply with regulations or industry standards. These regulations often require organizations to conduct regular vulnerability assessments. By conducting a vulnerability assessment, organizations demonstrate compliance, which can prevent fines and penalties and can build trust with customers and partners.

Vulnerability assessment: Security scanning process

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

1. Vulnerability identification – Discover IT Assests

The initial step in the vulnerability assessment process is the discovery of IT assets. This involves identifying and cataloging all technology resources owned or used by the organization, including hardware like servers and networking equipment, software applications, and cloud-based assets.

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 – identify Vulnerabilities

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:

  • Which systems are affected.
  • What data is at risk.
  • Which business functions are at risk.
  • Ease of attack or compromise.
  • Severity of an attack.
  • 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:

  • Introduction of new security procedures, measures or tools.
  • The updating of operational or configuration changes.
  • 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

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

  • Web application scanners that test for and simulate known attack patterns.
  • Protocol scanners that search for vulnerable protocols, ports and network services.
  • 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 vs vulnerability management

Vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management are two separate – but related – security measures.

Vulnerability management is the ongoing, regular process of identifying, assessing, reporting on, managing and remediating cyber vulnerabilities across endpoints, workloads, and systems. A vulnerability assessment refers only to the initial scan of the network, application, host, database, or other asset. In other words, a vulnerability assessment is the first part of the larger vulnerability management process.

These two activities, when taken together, can help organizations identify and address weaknesses within the IT environment, thus helping the organization harden the attack surface and protect the business from threats and risks.