With time, cybercriminals have begun employing sophisticated mediums to unleash chaos and vulnerabilities digitally. Vulnerabilities are becoming the most common and significant cause of many cyberattacks today. Managing them and preventing vulnerability exploits have become the most critical tasks for security teams. Continuous vulnerability scanning With different steps involved in the whole vulnerability management process, the first and primary step is to have a good vulnerability management tool that defines the strength of the entire vulnerability management program.
“With 18.8 billion reports of attacks recorded until August 2021, there is a highly likely chance that cyberattacks will affect more than 19 billion devices in the recent future.”
Vulnerability Scanning, the Basement of your Vulnerability Management Program
Vulnerabilities are the most common reason for many security attacks today. Once the vulnerabilities breach your devices, there is nothing you can do instead. Rather spend a fortune to restructure IT assets to become functional again.
Vulnerability Management is an important cyber hygiene routine implemented by security teams to prevent cyberattacks. Vulnerability Management Process consists of numerous steps, from scanning, detection, assessment, prioritization, and remediation. Scanning is the primary step that acts as a basement for the whole process. It is critical for security teams to run continuous vulnerability scanning with a good vulnerability management software and identify all vulnerabilities prevalent across their network devices.
Evaluating the Vulnerability Scanning Process
Vulnerability scans are an indispensable part of a vulnerability management program. Being the foremost step of your vulnerability management process, it might make or break your security posture. Have you ever wondered how effective your vulnerability scanning is?
Have you tried to evaluate your vulnerability scanning process? How essential is vulnerability scanning in the world driven by connected devices and Industry 4.0? If you have just pondered on the questions mentioned here, let us direct you to a few more questions that you should ask yourself right away:
- How long does it take for you to scan vulnerabilities?
- Is your vulnerability scan data accurate?
- How often do you run vulnerability scans?
Well, vulnerability scanning is the first step to creating a comprehensive safeguarding portfolio for your organization. Let’s dive in and see why you must ask yourself these three questions!
Important Metrics to measure Vulnerability Scans
1) The Speed of Vulnerability Scans
Some find the vulnerability scan consumes a lot of time and resources. The speed of vulnerability scanning depends on several factors. Vulnerability scanners typically run the conventional ‘if-then scenarios’ to discover breaches in the network. Even a robust tool on the market takes 1-3 hours to scan vulnerabilities as ‘quick scans.’ Moreover, to do an ideal massive scan of vulnerabilities in an organization, scanning might take around 10 hours or more.
The conventional legacy vulnerability scanning tools can take hours and extend to days to make a full scan. Hence, modern-day vulnerability management tools which take a few minutes to discover vulnerabilities are preferred today. If there is a delay of days to detect the vulnerability, it creates huge security gaps and collapses the whole vulnerability management program.
2) Accuracy of Vulnerability Detection
False positives and incorrect vulnerability data are the biggest pitfalls of vulnerability scanning. By the looks of it, false positives occur when a scanner flags a vulnerability incorrectly. There is nothing as failing in scanning to identify vulnerability. Having insufficient access to comprehensive vulnerability information often leads here.
During vulnerability scans, accuracy plays a critical role; you cannot achieve optimum security without precision. The accuracy of vulnerability scans determines how functional the security teams are to find and prioritize vulnerability for remediation. Accurate vulnerability detection results give the following benefits:
- It makes validation easier for security teams to find and eliminate vulnerabilities as per the severity
- Increases the efficacy of your vulnerability management program
- Enables you to rely upon the vulnerability metrics and reports without any hiccups
Your vulnerability management software should have an extensive vulnerability database or repository to attain accuracy while discovering vulnerabilities. The vulnerability database should have an adequate number of vulnerability checks and must be updated daily.
Choosing a precise vulnerability management tool with an extensive database might answer your prayers for accurate vulnerability detection.
3) Frequency of Vulnerability Scans
Vulnerability management is not a one-time and periodic process. Cybersecurity professionals discovered that continuous vulnerability scanning and monitoring will help against attackers launching potential security threats. Organizations should practice running vulnerability scans continuously.
If you want to use large-scale cybersecurity strategies, running vulnerability scans frequently will fill the gaps in security posture. In general, the frequency of vulnerability scanning for an organization is reported to be once every quarter. In today’s challenging scenario, where a ransomware attack occurs once every 11 seconds, running vulnerability scans once or twice a month will let your security framework down. The quarterly and yearly vulnerability scanning is not sufficient to prevent security breaches.
Hence, the ideal way is to practice continuous vulnerability scanning to identify many weaknesses and security issues that attackers can exploit and create havoc.
Rapid, Accurate, and Continuous Vulnerability Scanning made easier with SanerNow
Understanding vulnerability scans’ essence and real-life implications might seem exponentially challenging. However, things get better with SecPod SanerNow Vulnerability Management Tool, as vulnerability scanning has never been this seamless!
Industry’s fastest Vulnerability Scans in 5 Minutes:
SanerNow offers the fastest vulnerability scans in the industry. You can run scans and detect vulnerabilities across multiple devices in less than 5 mins.
Powered by the World’s Largest Vulnerability Database:
SecPod leverages its homegrown world’s largest SCAP repository with more than 160,000 vulnerability checks. This assures accuracy in vulnerability detection effectively.
Scheduled and Automated Vulnerability Scans:
SecPod SanerNow Vulnerability Management Software is built around a robust automation module, making scheduling vulnerability scans daily a cakewalk. You can easily run continuous vulnerability scanning with the benefit of single-touch automation.
SanerNow also provides precise vulnerability assessment, intact prioritization, and integrated patch remediation, all from a single-cloud-based console and out-of-the-box scanning features.
If you haven’t taken the first step of getting to know SanerNow, schedule a demo here.
We’ve got your vulnerability management covered.