The cyberattack on LastPass, a popular password management firm, was unexpected and stunned the world. A vulnerability in a 3rd party multimedia software led to the compromise of LastPass’s network, and its business, brand trust, and reputation went down. Like LastPass, critical vulnerabilities may run rampant in your network without Vulnerability Assessment Methodologies and have a disastrous impact on your devices too. You must learn to adapt and combat new threats by discovering new vulnerabilities daily. Remediating them will be easier with a patch management software.
Following a methodology for assessing vulnerabilities can ensure safety and security and provide many other benefits, improving your organization’s defense with a good vulnerability management tool.
So how do you do that?
Understanding Vulnerability Assessment Methodology
Vulnerability assessment is a step-by-step process of scanning and detecting vulnerabilities in a system, followed by classifying and prioritizing them for remediation. And vulnerability assessment methodology involves using different tools, techniques, and methods to carry out vulnerability assessment. It is an integral step in the vulnerability management process, as it determines the time and effort needed to remediate and manage the detected vulnerabilities efficiently and effectively.
How to Perform Vulnerability Assessment:
- Identifying network assets:
The integral first step in the vulnerability assessment process is identifying all devices within the network. This step helps provide a broad picture of the network and helps plan the next step in assessing and managing vulnerabilities. - Performing a vulnerability scan:
Extensive scans to identify vulnerabilities using comprehensive vulnerability scanners are key. Your scanner must scan for critical vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and security deviations that might pose a risk. This vital step defines your organization’s defense because if a vulnerability is left undetected, it might cripple your network.
- Assessing the detected vulnerabilities:
After detecting vulnerabilities, smartly assessing vulnerabilities based on different factors are key for intelligent remediation. Efficient prioritization, by finding out which crucial devices are at risk based on criticality, high-fidelity attacks, CVSS score, and more, is a must. Focusing on critical asset vulnerabilities ensures that you are remediating those that matter.
Vulnerability Assessment vs Penetration Testing: Understand the Difference
When it comes to assessing security risks, there’s a significant difference between vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. While vulnerability assessment zeroes in on pinpointing weaknesses and vulnerabilities, penetration testing takes it a step further by actively exploiting those vulnerabilities to gauge their real-world implications.
Here are some key differences in penetration testing and vulnerability assessment :
- Risk Exploitation: Pen-testing involves actively seeking to exploit vulnerabilities to gauge their repercussions while vulnerability assessment is more of detection and not exploitation.
- Real-World Attack Simulation: Pen-testing simulates real-world attack scenarios to uncover potential entry points and the extent of potential damage while vulnerability assessment just involves finding risks.
- Reduced Scope: While pen-testing generally focuses on specific target systems or components, vulnerability assessment is more broader in scope.
Types of Vulnerability Assessment
- Network-Centric Vulnerability Assessment:
What is it? It’s the process of uncovering vulnerabilities residing within network devices, including routers, switches, firewalls, and other infrastructure components. This is done by scanning your network for vulnerabilities.
What is it used for? To pinpoint weaknesses within the network architecture that malicious actors could exploit to gain unauthorized access, exfiltrate data, or execute attacks.
How to do it? By using specialized software tools and methodologies that perform port and vulnerability scanning, password cracking, and network mapping to identify potential risks. - Application-Centric Vulnerability Assessment:
What is it? It’s the process of assessing security flaws within software applications, websites, mobile apps, and APIs.
What is it used for? To evaluate if the applications are vulnerable to known exploits, assigning severity levels to detected vulnerabilities and proposing remedial actions as necessary.
How to do it? By using tools that test for prevalent vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other critical risks, utilizing a blend of automated and manual approaches. - API-Focused Vulnerability Assessment
What is it? It’s the process of assessing potential security risks within APIs, scrutinizing their design, implementation, and deployment for weaknesses.
What is it used for? The aim is to ensure that APIs remain secure, reliable, and resilient against malicious attacks by eliminating the detected risks.
How to do it? By using specialized software tools and pen-testing methods to detect risks. - Host-Focused Vulnerability Assessment
What is it? It’s the process of assessing vulnerabilities within individual host systems, that includes servers, workstations, and laptops.
What is it used for? It is used to secure host systems from known vulnerabilities such as missing security patches or outdated software.
How to do it? By using a mix of automated and manual tools and methods, you detect and assess security risks in hosts. - Wireless Network Vulnerability Assessment
What is it? It’s the process of assessing risks that target or reside in wireless networks, including Wi-Fi networks.
What is it used for? It is used to secure wireless networks and systems from known vulnerabilities, missing patches and other risks.
How to do it? By testing for common weaknesses like weak encryption, default passwords, and rogue access points. Specialized software tools and techniques are utilized to conduct these assessments. - Cloud-Centric Vulnerability Assessment
What is it? It’s the process of assessing vulnerabilities that targets cloud infrastructure and services, including platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
What is it used for? It is used to secure cloud networks and systems from dangerous vulnerabilities and potential cyberattacks.
How to do it? By scanning cloud infrastructure for known vulnerabilities and assessing the security posture of cloud applications and services. Done with specialized tools.
What Are You Doing Wrong in Your Vulnerability Assessment?
One of the formidable challenges security admins faces is efficiently assessing vulnerabilities for intelligent remediation. Vulnerability assessment is a laborious process with scope for mistakes. Avoiding them can make your vulnerability management process and cyber defense easier. Here are some of the common mistakes we make while performing vulnerability assessments:
- Prioritizing based on CVSS score alone:
CVSS score is static and can provide a false idea of a vulnerability. An advanced process of prioritizing vulnerabilities based on criticality and high fidelity can be the difference-maker in effective remediation. - Spending too much time remediating vulnerabilities:
Ideally, it’s critical to remediate all vulnerabilities, but achieving this takes a lot of time. Further, some vulnerabilities take much time to remediate, while others need to be remediated immediately. So it’s important to pick and choose remediation and not spend too much time remediating low-risk vulnerabilities. - Performing routine tasks manually:
Routine and repeatable tasks like vulnerability scans should be automated instead of performing them manually. Especially with new vulnerabilities being detected every day, continuous and automated scans are the need of the hour. Further automation improves your cyber defense and your team’s efficiency too. - Using bulky and hard-to-read reports:
Reports are key in tracking progress. But if they are hard to read, it becomes useless. Creating concise reports that provide insights is important to ensure you effectively track and learn from what you’re doing.
Here are a few best practices that can make your vulnerability assessment better.
Closing Thoughts
Technology evolves rapidly, and hiding in its shadows are vulnerabilities that threaten to overshadow the positive impact evolution creates. You must take concrete measures and ensure safety. By following a robust vulnerability assessment methodology with rigorous scanning and intelligent assessment, you can reduce potential risk.
Because the number of vulnerabilities never falls, and the risks always rise. So, we must always be ready.