Staying one step ahead of potential breaches is a top priority for security teams within organizations of all sizes. Vulnerability scanning has long been a foundation of these efforts, allowing businesses to identify weaknesses in their security posture. However, as cyberattacks grow in sophistication and scale and with a large number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) cataloged each year, it’s becoming increasingly clear that vulnerability scanning is not enough.
What is vulnerability scanning?
Vulnerability scanning is a high-level way to check operating systems, apps or networks for security weaknesses or potential vulnerabilities. The goal is to conduct a vulnerability assessment to find gaps (like outdated software or firmware) or exploitable security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that cyber criminals could exploit.
In practice, vulnerability scanning means using specialized web applications or vulnerability scanning tools to scan servers, laptops and workstations connected to a network.
Security teams can perform various types of vulnerability scans like external scans that look at identified vulnerabilities attackers could exploit if they were starting outside your network. Or internal vulnerability scanning where they could scan for vulnerabilities that insiders could exploit, such as exposed password hashes. They can also perform authenticated scans that use privileged credentials to detect threats resulting from weak passwords, malware or unauthenticated scans to find weaknesses within operating systems, services listening on open ports and more to see their network from an attacker’s perspective.
In fact, some security standards, like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), require organizations to conduct vulnerability scans on a regular basis.
Limitations of vulnerability scanning
Vulnerability scanning offers a systematic scanning process as a part of performing security testing of your digital environment to look for weaknesses. It ofte ..
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