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Vulnerability Assessment Tools: What are They and Which are the Best Ones?
Quick Summary: In this era of cybersecurity, vulnerability assessment tools are vital for tightening the security of your digital landscape. They automate and streamline the process of security assessment. Discover more about these tools in this article and check the best free options.
Cyberattacks are a reality in this interconnected world that must not be taken lightly. Organizations that fail to assess the gravity of such threats must face serious reputational, financial, and legal repercussions. So, they are not just a nightmare for common users, but a serious headache for organizations as well.
But the million-dollar question is, what are the major causes of cyberattacks? Security experts state that the primary reasons for cyberattacks are human errors, social engineering, and vulnerabilities. While you can control the former two factors with stronger security protocols and policies, vulnerabilities remain a constant threat.
Attackers often look for vulnerabilities in the targeted systems or applications because they offer the best opportunity to compromise their security. The attackers can exploit vulnerabilities to carry out a wide range of attacks, such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection, session hijacking, and so on.
Therefore, organizations need a comprehensive vulnerability assessment program to mitigate the corresponding risks. You can automate this process with the use of feature-packed tools that help in the identification, categorization, and prioritization of vulnerabilities. These vulnerability assessment tools can streamline the entire process.
This article aims to provide a complete understanding of these tools, how they work, and their essential features. Besides, you will also learn some of the best free options for these tools. Keep scrolling to find out all this information.
“According to Verizon’s data breach investigation report, vulnerabilities are among the top three primary reasons for security breaches.”
In This Blog
- What are Vulnerability Assessment Tools and How Do They Work?
- Top 5 Free Security Vulnerability Assessment Tools
- Features You Must Look into a Vulnerability Assessment Tool
- Final Note
What are Vulnerability Assessment Tools and How Do They Work?
Vulnerability assessment tools are designed to help you identify, categorize, and prioritize vulnerabilities without human intervention. They are also called vulnerability scanning tools. Think of them like a magic wand that you can use to uncover potential security weaknesses as well as know their types and severity.
These tools help maintain robust security for your web applications and other digital assets. They can discover common vulnerabilities and exposures like OWASP Top 10 and CWE-25 for various assets. You can identify potential weak spots that attackers could exploit and minimize the ensuing risk.
They can flag up configuration flaws, outdated components, missing patches, and more with a comprehensive risk assessment.
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Types of vulnerability assessments you can perform with these tools:
- Host-based Assessment: It involves testing servers and other host machines for weak spots that might put their security at risk.
- Network-based Assessment: The network infrastructure is scanned to discover vulnerabilities.
- Wireless Network Assessment: Scans wireless networks and detects potential misconfigurations and vulnerabilities within access points.
- Application Assessment: Identifies common security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in web apps using application vulnerability assessment tools.
- Database Assessment: It discovers the weak spots in the database to ensure optimal security for data.
These tools work in the following ways:
- Discovery: They start by conducting thorough automated vulnerability scanning for networks, applications, and other digital assets.
- Detection: Scanned information is matched with patterns and signatures of common risks to identify issues. Advanced scanners can also analyze behavior to identify security flaws.
- Analysis: After identifying vulnerabilities, they are categorized and prioritized depending on their severity and exploitability.
- Reporting: A report is generated that includes the assessment findings. Some tools can also offer suggestions or guidance for remediation.
Top 5 Free Security Vulnerability Assessment Tools
Undoubtedly, you would prefer to choose the best tool to assess digital assets for vulnerabilities. Such a tool will offer accurate results, better scanning speed, ease of use, and several other benefits. And, if they are free, it will be an icing on the cake. This is what you will get with the following tools.
1. ZeroThreat
It is a next-gen dynamic application security testing tool that offers a fast and easy way to identify and mitigate security risks. With built-in threat intelligence and an AI-powered spider, it can discover every type of vulnerability with the highest accuracy. It not only discovers common security flaws like input validation, misconfigurations, poor authentication, etc, but it can also identify complex weaknesses.
It offers the best features for API and web app security testing. Faster speed and reliable results bring it to the list of top API and web application vulnerability assessment tools. ZeroThreat is easily available via any platform with its online cloud-based interface. It has earned recognition among the security testing community in a short span of time.
Key Features of ZeroThreat
- Zero configuration is required for use.
- Reduce 90% of efforts in manual pen tests.
- 5X faster scanning results.
- Out-of-band application security testing.
- Zero-day/1-day/N-day vulnerability detection.
- Help to prevent session hijacking.
- API testing (GraphQL, REST, and SOAP).
- It can scan web pages protected behind logins.
- Business logic testing.
- Secret scanning.
- Zero false positives.
- CI/CD integration.
Pricing: Free
2. ZAP
Zed Attack Proxy or ZAP is a feature-rich and open-source web app vulnerability scanner. It is maintained by a team of volunteers spreading across the world. It was developed by OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). Beginners, just like experienced security experts and developers, can use it easily.
With the use of ZAP, anyone with the requisite knowledge can evaluate web apps for security and identify inherent weaknesses. It allows security experts and developers to identify and fix various common security vulnerabilities. Consequently, allowing security experts and developers to reduce the attack surface for web apps.
Key Features of ZAP
- Works as a proxy between the targeted web app and a user’s web browser.
- Active scanning offers automated scanning for common vulnerabilities
- Spidering navigates the target web app and maps out pages and functions.
- Passive scanning observes web app traffic.
- Features to test authentication and session management.
Pricing: Free
3. OpenVAS
It is another open-source vulnerability scanner that comes with many excellent features. OpenVAS offers versatile functionality for vulnerability scanning, reporting, and management. There is also an active community of developers and security experts who are contributing to the advancement of this tool. It is customizable with different types of plugins.
It can monitor networks, systems, and applications to discover potential security weaknesses. Further, it can evaluate potential risks, report them, and provide guidance for remediation. The reports it provides are detailed.
Key Features of OpenVAS
- Provides authenticated and unauthenticated scanning.
- It supports more than 26,000 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs).
- It offers GCF as a default feed that has more than 50,000 vulnerability tests.
- A task wizard that offers scan configuration, task naming, scheduling scans, target IP address, and authorized scans.
Pricing: Free
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4. Nexpose
It is provided by Rapid7 and offers excellent features to discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities. The real-time monitoring of threat exposures ensures optimal protection by continuously scanning the attack surface. It thoroughly scans networks to discover all assets. It helps to assess vulnerabilities based on their impact on your organization.
Dynamic risk scoring feature helps in prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their criticality to help prioritize remediation efforts. It prioritizes the vulnerabilities in the context of your organization. Vulnerabilities can be managed efficiently with this approach.
Key Features of Nexpose
- It offers adaptive security that can detect assets and their vulnerabilities when they enter the network.
- It can be integrated with cloud infrastructures like AWS and Azure.
- Offers 50+ filters to create asset groups.
- Allow filtering critical assets with its tag feature.
- Check for system misconfigurations.
Pricing: Free Trial, Paid
5. Burp Suite
Burp Suite is a popular and feature-rich security vulnerability assessment tool. It scans web applications for vulnerabilities and detects a myriad of security flaws. Security experts or developers can manage the whole security testing process with this vulnerability scanner software, from mapping and analysis of an application’s attack surface to detection and exploitation of vulnerabilities.
It offers various built-in tools to test and identify vulnerabilities. It can intercept HTTP requests that can be modified to check the application’s security to malicious HTTP requests. It is written in the Java programming language.
Key Features of Burp Suite
- Offers proxy server to work around the requests and responses.
- Automates attacks with built-in intruder tool.
- It offers spider that automates application mapping.
- A built-in repeater helps to send repeated requests.
- It can check the randomness of tokens with its sequencer.
- It can uncover IODR and session hijacking flaws with decoder.
- Allows integration of external components.
Pricing: Free, Paid
Features You Must Look into a Vulnerability Assessment Tool
The following features are a must-have for a good tool used to assess vulnerabilities.
Risk-based Prioritization
Prefer a tool that offers risk-based vulnerability reports. Such tools prioritize vulnerabilities based on factors like exploitability, severity, and asset criticality. They offer optimal risk assessment, providing insights into critical security threats.
Comprehensive Coverage
The tool should provide comprehensive coverage of the threat landscape by scanning your web apps, APIs, and other digital assets. Automatic discovery of internal and external APIs to scan for vulnerabilities is another great feature you should look for.
Technology Independent
Scanners that only work with specific technologies may not identify vulnerabilities for all your applications and systems. Hence, pick a tool that can scan for vulnerabilities regardless of technology, framework, or programming language.
Automated Scanning
Automation is an essential function of vulnerability assessment tools. They automate asset discovery and vulnerability scanning that help in managing security for your digital assets. Choose a tool that requires almost zero human effort in vulnerability scanning and detection.
Integration
Identifying and resolving vulnerabilities in the pre-production environment will help mitigate security risks more. Hence, you should look for a tool that can easily integrate into your SDLC to find and fix potential loopholes.
Detailed Report
A good tool provides detailed reports after a vulnerability scan, including compliance and CVSS scores. Such information will enable security experts and developers to make the right decisions when eliminating weaknesses.
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Final Note
In conclusion, identifying and patching vulnerabilities is critical for securing your digital assets in this era of cybersecurity. Vulnerability assessment tools are pivotal to meeting this requirement. There are lots of such tools with various features that make it difficult to make a choice.
However, the best vulnerability scanner we have mentioned in this article will help you narrow down the choices and help you pick the right one that fits your requirements. Grab the right tool and hunt down all vulnerabilities before they pose a serious threat to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
CVE vulnerability scan: what is it?
CVE vulnerability scanning is nothing but vulnerability scanning that aims to detect security flaws as described in the CVE glossary. CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) is a classified listing of vulnerabilities. It evaluates the threat level for vulnerabilities with CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) score.