In the face of exponential growth in vulnerabilities, IT admins struggle to keep up with the vulnerabilities in devices across the network. As a result, it is laborious to maintain the security posture, and these vulnerabilities become hackers’ paradise to infiltrate into an organization’s network.
Hence, it is essential to have a good network vulnerability assessment program that evaluates devices across your network that is prone to vulnerabilities, assign severity, and recommends remediation.
In this article, you will learn how to perform a continuous network vulnerability assessment program that helps you to maintain a sound security posture.
What is a Network Vulnerability Assessment?
Network vulnerability assessment is identifying, detecting, and prioritizing the vulnerabilities or loopholes in devices across the network right before cybercriminals exploit them. You can do it manually or use an efficient network scanner to detect vulnerabilities in your IT environment.
Steps to perform vulnerability assessment in network devices
- Asset Inventory
Inventory of devices in the network is a fundamental part of the vulnerability assessment program. With clear visibility over devices in the network, you can protect them easily. Hence, it is essential to list all devices in the network to perform a good vulnerability assessment program.
2. Identification
Identify the vulnerabilities in the devices across the network with the help of an efficient network scanner. The network scanner must detect accurate vulnerability data for precise vulnerability assessment. And it shouldn’t produce false positives that would drain your energy mitigating and remediating vulnerabilities.
3. Prioritization
There are better ways to perform a vulnerability assessment program than mitigating every vulnerability in devices across the network. You can use CVSS scores to mitigate high-severity vulnerabilities first that pose a greater risk. In addition, prioritizing vulnerabilities based on evaluated risk by considering multiple factors like public risk ratings, intelligence feeds, trending vulnerabilities and reports, and more will help you to manage all the vulnerabilities effectively.
4. Mitigation and Remediation
Now you know what all the high-severity vulnerabilities are and how they impact your attack surface, you must take the necessary actions to mitigate and remediate them instantly.
Final Thoughts
A good network vulnerability assessment provides a better understanding of your organization’s security posture. Also, you can manage the rising vulnerabilities effectively by regularly performing the vulnerability management program.
Once you start with a network vulnerability assessment program, you will not only strengthen your network security posture; also, you will be able to keep cyber-attacks and cybercriminals at bay!
So, what are you waiting for?
Tighten your security posture with a good network vulnerability assessment program. NOW!