What is Vulnerability Assessment?
Stop Searching and Start Patching. Everything You Need for Vulnerability Assessment Begins Right Here
Vulnerability assessment is a process that identifies and evaluates network vulnerabilities by constantly scanning and monitoring your organization's entire attack surface for risks. It is the first step in defending your network against vulnerabilities that may threaten your organization.
Unfortunately, almost 60% of cybersecurity professionals say they don’t have a set schedule to scan for vulnerabilities and many don’t scan for publicly disclosed vulnerabilities at all. Don’t become one of these statistics. Tenable can help you adopt best practices for vulnerability assessment, including recommendations about how to make your program stronger.
Here are a few highlights of what you’ll find:
How to Run Your First Vulnerability Scan
Create your first Nessus vulnerability scan with five simple steps and explore other blogs about vulnerability assessment.
Learn MoreMaster the Fundamentals of Vulnerability Assessment
Discover and assess vulnerabilities and misconfigurations by identifying critical flaws in your attack surface.
Learn MoreVulnerability Assessment FAQ
Explore some frequently asked questions about vulnerability assessment.
Learn MoreVulnerability Assessment Solutions
Learn how Nessus gives you a unified view of all of the exposures and vulnerabilities across your assets.
Learn MoreTenable Connect - Vulnerability Assessment community
Tenable Connect is the #1 place to talk about vulnerability assessment, ask questions, and share tips.
Learn MoreMonitor and Protect Your Entire Attack Surface With Continuous Vulnerability Assessment
Vulnerability assessment gives you comprehensive insight into the cyber exposure of all your assets, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security health indicators. With Nessus, you can be confident that your vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are remediated as you expect them to be. You can also automatically send related information directly to your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system to help you make more informed decisions about how to respond to weaknesses discovered within your network.
Understanding vulnerability assessment processes
Implementing a vulnerability assessment program can be stressful, but it's necessary to ensure your entire attack surface is thoroughly covered.
If you’re ready to implement a vulnerability assessment program for your organization, you may be unsure about where to begin. Here are five steps you can take to set the foundation for your vulnerability assessment program, and improve it as your company changes and evolves over time.
Overcoming Challenges Created by Disparate Vulnerability Management Tools
For decades, organizations looking to build the most comprehensive defenses to protect their attack surfaces have built a tech stack of disparate solutions. Every time an environment changes, security teams have generally bolted on new assessment tools to get visibility into that new environment. Unfortunately, these disparate solutions often silo data making it nearly impossible to see the big picture of your attack surface. This creates blind spots that leave doors open for attackers.
Single-purpose tools are no longer effective solutions for modern vulnerability assessments. They're burying your security teams in incomplete data that makes it challenging to understand where you have actual risk, how you should prioritize remediation, and what to do to maintain a risk-based vulnerability management program.
In this white paper, learn more about:
- Why teams experience technology overload
- Challenges created by disparate security solutions
- A real-world example of a potential threat that attackers exploited in the wild
- Why you need a risk-based vulnerability management program
Here are a couple other key points:
- On average, attackers have more than a seven-day advantage over your security team
- For about 34% of the vulnerabilities studied, an exploit was available the same day as the vulnerability disclosure
How Mature Are Your Cyber Defender Strategies?
Understanding What Your Vulnerability Assessment Strategies Reveal
When it comes to vulnerability assessment, Tenable Research discovered four distinct assessment types. From the most mature style to the least, they are Diligent, Investigative, Surveying and Minimalist. Here’s an overview of each:
Diligent
This is the highest level of vulnerability assessment maturity. Only about 5% of all organizations are Diligent. Transportation, hospitality, electronics, banking and telecommunication industries make up the majority.
Investigative
This is a medium-to-high level of maturity. Most enterprises, about 43%, are Investigative. Entertainment, utilities, education and healthcare comprise most of the Investigative style category.
Surveying
This is a low-to-medium level of maturity, representing about 19% of organizations. Overall, the utilities industry has the largest representation of Surveying styles.
Minimalist
This is the lowest maturity level and represents about 33 percent of enterprises, with a fairly even representation of industries across the style profile.
You can get insight into your own vulnerability assessment style by evaluating five related Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): scan frequency, scan intensity, authentication coverage, asset coverage and vulnerability coverage.
Access the power of community
All of your vulnerability assessment needs and Tenable knowledge in one place
Do you have questions about vulnerability assessment? Are you looking for other vulnerability assessment professionals for some advice? Have a great idea you want to share with others working in vulnerability assessment? The Tenable Connect community is a great place to ask questions and share tips, including vulnerability assessment-related tools and best practices.
Here are some sample conversations happening now:
How do I generate a report from already scanned systems?
I performed a vulnerability assessment on 100 of our systems last week in one scan. Now I want to get a report of 3/4 IP address from 100 systems. How do I do this?
See the AnswerHow does Nessus handle backported patches?
Nessus relies on backport.inc to prevent false positives. backport.inc contains mappings of known service banners to service banners that have arbitrarily high version numbers.
See More of This AnswerHow are PCI quarterly external and internal PCI network scans different?
While the PCI quarterly external policy is valid for official attestation, both policies can be used any time for scanning.
See More of This AnswerFrequently Asked Vulnerability Assessment Questions
What is a security vulnerability?
A security vulnerability is a weakness, bug, or programming mistake in hardware or software that attackers can exploit to compromise your network and gain unauthorized access to your data and systems.
What is vulnerability assessment?
A vulnerability assessment is a way you can discover, analyze and fix weaknesses within your attack surface to lessen the chance that attackers can exploit your network and gain unauthorized access to your systems and devices.
What does my organization’s attack surface look like?
Your organization's attack surface is made up of IT assets on your network. These assets have multiple points of exposure and can be at risk for exploitation. Historically, your attack surface was primarily traditional IT assets like servers and networks, but your modern IT attack surface now also includes mobile devices such as smartphones, desktops and laptops, and also virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, web apps, containers and IoT devices.
What is penetration testing?
Penetration testing is a way to detect weaknesses in your attack surface. The goal of your vulnerability assessment program is to find these weaknesses and fix them before attackers can exploit them. Penetration testing, also referred to as pen tests or pen testing, can help you find these weaknesses across your network. Pen testing is a stand-alone activity, not an ongoing process, and a third-party is often responsible for conducting these tests. Your organization should pen test often, for example, at least quarterly. Penetration testing gives you insight into how effective your vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management programs are.
What are the phases of penetration testing?
In most cases, penetration testing is generally completed with five stages including the initial engagement where you determine who will do your testing – complete with goals and expectations – the scope of the test, conducting the test, reporting on test findings, and a follow-up to review how you’re addressing remediation with re-testing as needed.
What’s the difference between vulnerability assessment and penetration testing?
Penetration testing gives you insight into weaknesses within your attack surface from a specific point in time. These tests help you better understand how well your vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management programs work. Pen tests can also help you define areas of improvement so you can set goals to strengthen your vulnerability assessment processes. Unlike pen testing, your vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management processes should be continuous to give you a more comprehensive look into your organization’s overall cyber exposure.
Are there different approaches to penetration testing?
Yes. There are two primary approaches you can adopt for pen tests. One is whitebox testing, which is more targeted than the alternative, blackbox testing. Generally, in whitebox testing your tester already knows information about your target, but in blackbox testing you do not share additional target information with the tester. In blackbox testing, the tester uses network sweeps without credentials, whereas whitebox testing is generally within a credentialed environment. You can use Nessus Professional for both types of pen testing.
What is a vulnerability scanner and what does it do?
A vulnerability scanner helps you discover misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other security issues within your IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, operating systems and applications. Passive network monitors can scan your environment in a safe and non-intrusive way to eliminate blind spots in your attack surface so you can discover vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation.
Why do I need to do vulnerability assessments?
Vulnerability assessments are an important part of your comprehensive cybersecurity program. These assessments give you insight into your cyber exposure so you can see where you may have holes or weaknesses within your IT attack surface (i.e. assets that connect with your network) and then plan for remediation. A vulnerability assessment helps you understand the actual risk your organization faces so you have a clear understanding of the vulnerabilities within your environment.
What is a security vulnerability?
What is vulnerability assessment?
What does my organization’s attack surface look like?
What is penetration testing?
What are the phases of penetration testing?
What’s the difference between vulnerability assessment and penetration testing?
Are there different approaches to penetration testing?
What is a vulnerability scanner and what does it do?
Why do I need to do vulnerability assessments?
Vulnerability Assessment Solutions
Continuous vulnerability assessment is an important component of your overall vulnerability management program. Vulnerability assessment gives you insight into where you have cyber exposure within your attack surface, the volume and types of vulnerabilities that may be exploited, and the potential risk these vulnerabilities could pose to your organization. Vulnerability assessment helps you uncover these risks for prioritization.
Today, your modern attack surface consists of a variety of assets, including traditional IT, transitory, mobile, dynamic and operational technology. Without complete visibility into your attack surface, assessing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across all of these devices is challenging; however, a single vulnerability assessment platform like Nessus can give you a unified view of all of your exposures and vulnerabilities.
Here’s a closer look at the benefits of vulnerability assessment and why it’s an important process for your organization to adopt as part of your comprehensive cybersecurity program.
Vulnerability Assessment Benefits
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Cyber Exposure Awareness
Vulnerability assessment can help your team identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other weaknesses across your entire attack surface.
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Configurations and Audit Patching
Vulnerability assessment helps ensure you can remediate vulnerabilities and misconfigurations as outlined by your organizational goals.
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Incident Management Information
With vulnerability assessment, you can automatically send vulnerability and misconfiguration information to your SIEM to enrich event data, help prioritize events for investigation and inform team responses.
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Process Effectiveness
Vulnerability assessment gives you insight into your current cybersecurity processes so you can evaluate how effective they are and what you can do to improve your overall program.
Nessus: The Gold Standard for Vulnerability Assessment
Assets and vulnerabilities on your network constantly change. Get a full picture and protect your entire attack surface with Nessus Professional.
Vulnerability Assessment Blog Bytes
How Vulnerability Scanning Is Used for Penetration Testing
Penetration testing is a key component of your vulnerability assessment program, enabling you to delve into your attack surface to find weaknesses and fix them before attackers harm your organization.
Three Vulnerability Intelligence Insights Worth Your Attention
If you're part of a cybersecurity team, you know there is a never-ending list of vulnerabilities that routinely come across your desk. Traditionally, that’s meant you dig into news headlines, forums and other information exchanges to see which vulnerability is getting the most attention so you can focus your efforts.
How to Run Your First Vulnerability Scan with Nessus
Conducting a vulnerability assessment has never been easier thanks to Nessus. Nessus vulnerability assessment gives you full visibility into your network so you can find vulnerabilities and make a plan to fix them. You can complete a Nessus vulnerability assessment with a few simple steps.
Take the Guesswork Out of Vulnerability Assessment
Nessus automates point-in-time assessments to help you quickly identify and fix vulnerabilities, including software flaws, missing patches, malware and misconfigurations across a variety of operating systems, devices and applications.
Trust
Nessus is trusted by tens of thousands of organizations globally with 2 million downloads. 65% of the Fortune 500 rely on Nessus.
Accuracy
Nessus has the industry’s lowest false positive rate with six-sigma accuracy (measured at .32 defects per 1 million scans).
Comprehensive Coverage
Nessus has the deepest and broadest coverage with more than 311,000 plugins, coverage for more than 114K CVEs, and more than 100 new plugins released weekly within 24 hours of vulnerability disclosure.
Real-Time Assessments
With more than 140,000 plugins automatically updating in real-time, Nessus gives you the most timely information about the latest vulnerabilities and malware so you can decrease your assessment and research time and get to remediation faster.
Insight and Visibility
Nessus provides insight into potential malware running on hosts throughout your environment with seamless integration with multiple commercial threat intelligence feeds. You get full visibility into your vulnerabilities with every assessment.
Easy-to-Use
Built for security practitioners, by security practitioners, Nessus was created with a single focus—to provide you with an intuitive experience so you can find and fix vulnerabilities, faster and with more confidence.
Nessus: Take the Guesswork Out of Vulnerability Assessment
The industry standard for vulnerability assessment. Try it now for free.
- Tenable Nessus
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