What is a Vulnerability Assessment?
What is a Vulnerability Assessment?
Vulnerability assessment refers to a tool, technique, or process that examines a specific component of a business to surface particular security weaknesses. Applications, services, networks, infrastructure, and people can all present inadvertent security issues. By performing vulnerability assessments, such as automated patch checking, code analysis, and social engineering exercises, organizations can mitigate threats and lift their overall security posture.
What are the benefits of a vulnerability assessment?
There are several benefits of performing a vulnerability assessment for businesses looking to enhance their security posture.
Reduce security risks
A vulnerability assessment directly identifies gaps in your environment that adversaries could exploit. By understanding where your security posture needs improvement, you can instantly start developing preventative measures to enhance your security. Frequently conducting vulnerability assessments will uncover unknown security weaknesses, allowing you to fix them ahead of time.
Improve incident response pathways and exposure management
Vulnerability assessments allow you to plan for incident response processes and exposure management techniques. Using vulnerability analysis, you may find that some vulnerabilities may be difficult to close off or take a long time to remediate.
In these cases, you can develop or hone incident response plans, including exposure management techniques, stakeholder communications plans, and other post-incident pathways.
Support compliance and audit efforts
An important part of security compliance is to regularly monitor your systems for compliance with regulatory framework auditing and reporting conditions. Conducting a vulnerability analysis aligned with specific frameworks can help identify areas where you may need to refine your architecture and controls to achieve compliance. By running regular vulnerability assessments, you create a log of security posture management checks that you can use for auditing purposes.
Enhance security posture management by removing identified vulnerabilities
Vulnerability assessments help identify areas where your business could enhance its security posture or improve current cybersecurity protocols and controls. By understanding where you can improve your security, you can prioritize vulnerabilities more easily based on their potential impact. This vulnerability management program provides a roadmap to help your cybersecurity team enhance the speed at which you address critical security issues.
What are security vulnerabilities?
Here are some of the most common security vulnerabilities that your business may encounter when running a vulnerability analysis.
Unhardened networks
Network hardening is the process of adding protective solutions and controls so that your network infrastructure is as secure as possible. If a part of your attack surface lacks specific security controls or has, for example, a misconfigured firewall, this would be considered an unhardened network vulnerability. Open ports or public networks can lead to the threat of a third party gaining access to your sensitive data without permission. Monitoring your networks for these potential threats is a central part of vulnerability management.
Deprecated software
Many legacy systems and software contain security vulnerabilities that are known to the wider industry. If a business continues to use legacy systems and deprecated software, they are at risk. Unsupported systems and software without new security patches and updates present risks. Modernize or replace these systems as soon as possible..
Insecure data management
Data management is a central part of effective security posture management. If your business has sub-par data handling policies, like ineffective encryption techniques, default log-in accounts, or unmanaged access controls, your data will be easier to access for unauthorized parties.
Configuration vulnerabilities
Configuration vulnerabilities refer to misconfigurations in your digital systems that make them prone to exploits. For example, a misconfiguration that shares an Amazon S3 bucket publicly could cause an unintended information exposure. This makes it vital for your business to regularly check active configurations to identify and address known vulnerabilities.
Weak user management
Employees and poorly protected user accounts, like those with weak passwords or without MFA, can pose a potential risk to your security posture. Businesses should regularly review user accounts, promote good password practices, require MFA for all accounts, and delete accounts from any users who no longer work with a company.
Unpatched vulnerabilities
When cybersecurity teams identify a vulnerability in a widely used system, it is an industry standard to publicize this information and share the news with other teams. Doing so through private channels allows any tool to issue a patch to solve the problem before third-party teams begin to use the exploit.
Due to this, cybersecurity teams should endeavor to always update to the most recent version of all the software they use, as these will contain the most recent security patches.
Insider threats
Insider threats occur when active employees either purposefully or accidentally trigger an unexpected security event. These threats are often connected to a lack of security knowledge, like falling into a phishing scam and losing access to their account. Internal threats are fairly common, making user education an important part of comprehensive ongoing security measures.
What are the types of vulnerability assessments?
There are several different types of vulnerability assessments that each address distinct types of vulnerabilities.
Scanning vulnerability assessment tools
Automated vulnerability scanning monitors a company’s attack surface and engages with its operating systems, network devices, and applications to check against a database of vulnerabilities identified by leading threat monitoring groups. If the scanner identifies one of the common vulnerabilities from the database in your system, it will alert your security team to take action.
Static analysis and dynamic analysis techniques
Static application security testing (SAST) is a vulnerability scanning tool that inspects the source code of applications to check for potential vulnerabilities. SAST is a central part of secure coding and is often integrated into the software development pipeline to help developers catch vulnerabilities before they are pushed to live code.
Dynamic application security testing (DAST) observes applications in runtime environments to detect any anomalies that could indicate a third-party interaction is present. DAST vulnerability testing identifies common exploits like cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and improper session handling scenarios.
Internal peer reviews
Internal code reviews by peers have become a standard practice in the shift-left era of software development. In an internal peer review, internal cybersecurity teams inspect each other’s existing code and systems to identify misconfigurations, potential vulnerabilities, and logic flaws that could be exploited by third parties in unexpected security events.
External reviews and penetration testing
External reviews follow a similar process to internal peer reviews, but are performed by external security firms. These companies specialize in granular inspections of security postures, inspecting tools, systems, applications, and code for potential vulnerabilities. External reviews may also involve red-teaming simulation exercises and penetration tests.
An integrated assessment process
Many cloud security vulnerability assessment tools, such as AWS Security Hub, actively collect data from a range of internal sources, like data logs, access control systems, and configuration settings, to offer a holistic overview of cloud environments. Integrated vulnerability analysis provides security teams with extensive visibility over their security posture.
Social engineering and physical assessments
One of the leading causes of security breaches is human error, with employees who accidentally fall for phishing scams or click on a malicious link representing a potential vulnerability. Security teams can offer seminars and teaching opportunities in an attempt to reduce these events from occurring. Additionally, businesses can launch automated social engineering tests to evaluate how effective employees are at identifying and responding to these threats.
What are continuous vulnerability assessments?
A continuous vulnerability assessment process is a scheduled or real-time vulnerability scanning system that monitors for anomalies. This approach to vulnerability analysis helps with continuous response, as any anomaly can be identified and prioritized for remediation as quickly as possible.
A vulnerability assessment report can offer an enhanced insight into the current health of your system at any given time. Reports may integrate with unified security solutions to provide deeper security insights.
What is the difference between risk assessment and vulnerability assessment?
A risk assessment is an additional assessment that businesses can use if they want to understand the potential impact of vulnerabilities they have uncovered. For example, after conducting a vulnerability assessment, businesses may then conduct a risk assessment with vulnerability analysis to determine which vulnerabilities present the largest threat to their objectives and security.
Combining a comprehensive vulnerability assessment with a risk assessment on the identified vulnerabilities can give further context to a company, allowing it to better prioritize certain fixes first.
What is the difference between breach simulation and vulnerability assessment?
A breach and attack simulation (BAS) is a form of red teaming exercise where either internal or external teams simulate an attack on your cyber defenses. These exercises aim to closely simulate an attack, using real-world strategies that unauthorized third-party groups are likely to employ. Typically, BAS follows known attack vector frameworks, such as those documented in MITRE ATT&CK.
While a vulnerability assessment aims to identify vulnerabilities, a breach simulation aims to exploit them in a secure and controlled environment to test incident responses. A business may use a breach simulation after they patch known vulnerabilities in order to test the validity of their fix.
How do vulnerability assessments help with cybersecurity compliance?
The vast majority of cybersecurity compliance frameworks, such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, and PCI DSS, require businesses to conduct vulnerability assessments regularly. By continually conducting these assessments, businesses perform their mandated due diligence, with reports to demonstrate compliance.
Frequently conducting vulnerability assessments helps a company prepare for an audit and reduces the risk of potential penalties if a breach were to occur.
How can AWS support your vulnerability assessment efforts?
AWS cloud security solutions can help protect your assets, networks, and people management.
Amazon Inspector automatically discovers workloads, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, container images, and AWS Lambda functions, as well as code repositories, and scans them for software vulnerabilities and network security attacks. This continuous vulnerability assessment service uses current common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) information and network accessibility to create contextual risk scores to help prioritize and resolve vulnerable resources.
AWS Security Hub unifies your cloud security operations, including integrated, continuous vulnerability assessment and always-on threat detection.
AWS Security Hub Cloud Security Posture Management (CPSM) performs security best practice checks and ingests security findings from AWS security services and partners. It combines these results with findings from other services and partner security tools, offering automated checks against your AWS resources to help identify misconfigurations and evaluate your security posture.
Get started with vulnerability assessment on AWS by creating a free account today.