What Is A Vulnerability Scan | Benefits and Key Features

Introduction

Businesses often get mixed up with the difference between a vulnerability scan and a penetration test. This article is aimed at helping to understand what a vulnerability scan is and its difference to a penetration test.

What is a vulnerability scan?

A vulnerability scan is an automated process that identifies known security vulnerabilities within systems and networks, often referred to as automated vulnerability scanning.

During a vulnerability scan, specialised software tools known as vulnerability scanners crawl systems or networks for known vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and weaknesses. Automated vulnerability scanning tools play a crucial role in identifying potential risk exposures and attack vectors across an organization’s networks, hardware, software, and systems. These vulnerabilities may include vulnerable and outdated software versions, missing security patches, default configurations, weak encryption algorithms, or other common security issues.

Vulnerability scanners use a database of known vulnerabilities and weaknesses, also known as a vulnerability signature database, to compare the configuration and software versions of given systems against known security gaps. When a vulnerability is identified the scanner generates a report detailing the specific vulnerability, its severity, and potential impact on the environment. Note that these specific vulnerabilities do not consider the context of which these issues arise, nor any mitigating controls currently in place. The severity of the vulnerability identified is based on the technical impact only.

How does a vulnerability scan compare to a penetration test?

Unlike penetration testing which involves simulated attacks and manual testing by cyber security experts, vulnerability scanning relies on automated tools to identify known security weaknesses.

Vulnerability scanning tools are a great way to check your application or network for known security weaknesses as well as providing a surface-level view of your attack surface. This can give a quick summary of the current vulnerabilities for the business. However, vulnerability scanners often report false positives and can only look for known security weaknesses without considering the context of the vulnerability. In addition to this, vulnerability scanners often miss impactful vulnerabilities which arise from poor validation and sanitisation practices or other misconfigurations such as cross-site scripting or overly permissive access controls.

Whilst a vulnerability scan can provide a real time brief overview of the security posture of any environment, it is important to back this up with a penetration test to help remove false positives, discover hidden vulnerabilities, and contextualise the issues to match the business risks and objectives.

What are the key features of a vulnerability scan?

Vulnerability scanners tackle a fundamental challenge in the security of systems and networks: finding the hidden weaknesses before an attacker does. External scans play a critical role in identifying vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems, applications, networks, and services. Internal vulnerability scans are equally important for identifying vulnerabilities within the network and analyzing the security of devices and systems inside the network. Here are some of the many key features you can find in vulnerability scanning tools:

Automated Scanning

Vulnerability scanning tools automate the process of scanning given systems, networks, or applications for known security vulnerabilities. This automation helps organisations scan environments efficiently and frees up security testers to focus on more important parts of manual testing.

Large-scale Coverage

Vulnerability scanners assess a wide range of systems, applications, and devices, including servers, workstations, network devices, web applications, and databases. This can help risk management teams to identify known common vulnerabilities across their entire IT infrastructure quickly.

Scheduled Scanning

Organisations can schedule regular vulnerability scans to ensure continuous monitoring of their security posture against known vulnerabilities. Scheduled scans can be configured to run at regular intervals, such as daily, weekly, or monthly, to identify and address emerging security issues. Some tools also have the ability to do live monitoring, which will run indefinitely and pick up vulnerabilities as they appear.

Network and Host Discovery

Vulnerability scanners can discover and enumerate devices and hosts on a network. This feature helps organisations identify all devices connected to their network and assess their security posture. For example, an employee may connect their own device to the network, unaware that their device is vulnerable. The vulnerability scanner would pick this up and notify risk management teams, who can then deal with this device.

Benefits of vulnerability scanning

Along with their many great features, vulnerability scanners also have a load of great benefits that can be taken advantage of. Regular vulnerability scanning is a proactive cybersecurity practice that allows for systematic monitoring and analysis of systems and networks for bugs, weak passwords, misconfigurations, and other security gaps. Some of these benefits include:

Fast Regular analysis

Vulnerability scans are usually fast and provide a quick overview of the attack surface for both small and large networks. They can also be configured to run when it is essential and convenient.

Integration with Security Tools

Vulnerability scanners often integrate with other security tools and platforms such as security information and event management (SIEM) systems to provide visibility into an organisation’s security posture and help with any new or ongoing incident response cases.

Scalability and Flexibility

Vulnerability scanning tools can adapt to changing environments, it can be scaled up to scan large-scale infrastructures as well as individual services where applicable, and they are also fully customisable based on the needs and criticality of business services.

Cost-Effectiveness

Vulnerability scans are cost-effective. Most tools have reasonable prices, and the prices of the vulnerability scanning tools, outweigh the potential cost of fines from data breaches or non-compliance.

Disadvantages of vulnerability scans

Like most security tools, vulnerabilities scanners have their limitations. It is important to understand these limitations when using them. Some of the limitations include but are not limited to:

Lack of context

Vulnerabilities identified by vulnerability scanning software do not consider the context of the issue, including the sensitivity of the data, nor the likelihood of exploitation and any mitigating measures in place. Evaluating vulnerabilities without considering sensitive data can lead to overlooking critical security gaps and potential data breaches.

Outdated databases

Whilst vulnerability scanners are efficient if their database is kept up to date, it will not be able to identify any recently discovered vulnerabilities if the vulnerability is not currently in the database used by it, potentially leaving a gap in the security of an environment.

False positives and negatives

Vulnerability scanners often include some false positives, as the scanner does not actively exploit the issue, but rather checks the configuration of the systems and checks these against its database of known issues. It may also not flag an issue that is present if its configuration does not quite match the known configuration issues.

Getting the most out of a vulnerability scan

Vulnerability scanning is a powerful tool, but like any tool its effectiveness depends on how you use it. To get the most out of your vulnerability scans there are a few things you need to consider: It is crucial to identify vulnerabilities both externally and internally to ensure comprehensive security coverage. Additionally, effective vulnerability management plays a vital role in reducing risk and providing insight for corrective actions.

Regular scanning

Setup a vulnerability scan to run regularly so that you are always aware of your business’ attack surface. This will give regular insights into your systems, any known vulnerabilities they contain, and potential implications of this.

Regularly update the database

Risk Management

Ensure that you incorporate any findings from the vulnerability scan into your risk management process to add context to the finding, as well as to prioritise remediations based on the technical severity of the vulnerability, and the risk to your business objectives.

Penetration Testing

Implement regular penetration testing alongside vulnerability scanning to back up the findings identified, add context to these issues, and to help assess the severity of this issues in relation to your business risk analysis and objectives.

Security assessments with SecQuest

At SecQuest, we understand the importance of identifying and addressing security weaknesses before they can be exploited by an attacker. Our penetration testing team go beyond automated scanning by simulating real-world attacks to uncover vulnerabilities automated scanning might miss. We provide detailed insights into the potential vulnerability and true exploitability of discovered vulnerabilities. With SecQuest, you can back up your risk management decisions with actionable penetration testing reports and expert recommendations. If you’re interested in having a vulnerability scan or any cyber security services within your organisation, you can speak to an expert here.