Exploring the Different Types of Vulnerability Scanning in Detail

Quick Summary: Vulnerability scanning is a proactive measure that helps organizations strengthen their security posture to mitigate risks before they pose a threat. But how many kinds of scanning can you perform to identify vulnerabilities? You will learn these types in this blog and understand how they help protect various digital assets.

Securing your digital assets, no matter the size of your organization, is not a cakewalk today; it takes extensive planning and resources. As cyberattacks become more sophisticated and frequent, it’s going to be even more challenging.

Continuous threat evaluation helps defend against these risks by uncovering vulnerabilities early before they are exploited by an attacker. This is what you can achieve with regular vulnerability scanning to check for exploitable loopholes.

Vulnerability scanning is a security assessment of applications, systems, and networks to identify potential vulnerabilities that help organizations mitigate cyber risks and protect data.

It is performed with an automated tool that simulates an attacker’s perspective. There are different types of vulnerability scanning, though, each catering to different security assessment needs.

Let’s learn about the different vulnerability scanning types in detail to find the diverse techniques to protect your digital assets.

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Understanding the Different Vulnerability Scanning Types

Identifying and resolving vulnerabilities is essential to strengthen the security posture of your digital landscape. However, it could be confusing without a proper understanding of how it works and what the different types are. So, let’s discuss the different types of vulnerability scanning.

Application Vulnerability Scanning

Application vulnerability assessment is one of the most common types of vulnerability scanning. It involves evaluating mobile and web-based applications from a security point of view. In today’s Agile development environment, both mobile and web apps undergo frequent updates.

However, in the race to launch frequent updates, organizations often cut corners in terms of security. Consequently, the changes lead to bugs that weaken the application’s security. If the bug remains even when the application is pushed into production, it causes a big security threat.

Hence, continuous security audits are pivotal to avoid any new vulnerability that may creep in with these frequent changes. Besides, potential threats can also arise from dependencies or third-party components. Implementing security audits into SDLC can help mitigate these threats.

A vulnerability scanner tool helps uncover these security weaknesses in applications by analyzing them along with external components and dependencies. For example, a web application vulnerability scanner scans web-based apps along with any plugins or themes to identify cyber threats.

This analysis will expose hidden security threats, including OWASP Top 10, such as cross-site scripting, encryption failure, broken authentication, SQL injection, and more. Apart from this, scanning also identifies vulnerabilities arising from APIs.

This type of vulnerability scanning helps:

• Assess the application’s current security state.
• Vulnerabilities that already exist and risks posed by them.
• Damages that existing vulnerabilities may have caused.

Host-based Vulnerability Scanning

Another vulnerability scanning is host-based scanning. As you can clearly understand from the name, this type of scanning involves an analysis of the host of an application or network. In this case, a vulnerability scanner tool will analyze the configurations, operating systems, and components for potential vulnerabilities.

A host can be a virtual or actual device that uses TCP/IP network protocol to transmit/receive data. Organizations with websites use web servers to host and transmit and store data. In the case of cloud hosting, there will be multiple servers spread across different locations.

Besides, there can be remote hosts or virtual hosts. Nevertheless, host-based security helps protect against cyber threats affecting servers, workstations, network devices, and more. Host-based vulnerability scanning identifies the vulnerabilities in hosts to prevent or mitigate cyber risks.

This type of scanning provides insights into:

• Outdated patches that can cause security weaknesses.
• The potential risk of vulnerabilities.
• Possible methods to mitigate the risks.
• Access rights that an attacker may get after an intrusion in the host.

Network Vulnerability Scanning

Scanning internal and external networks is essential to uncover security loopholes that can allow an attacker to penetrate your network. It is one of the most critical types of vulnerability scanning. It helps analyze your organization's network infrastructure.

These scans are essential to protect your network from Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. The process starts with network vulnerability scanners discovering and creating an inventory of assets that involve different systems and devices connected to a network.

These assets are then analyzed for common vulnerabilities. The scanner scans the network to uncover vulnerable ports, services, and devices with security weaknesses like weak passwords, authentication issues, and more. This type of vulnerability assessment includes:

• Scan for vulnerabilities and try to exploit them to identify the potential risks.
• Checking for default or weak passwords that could lead to brute force attacks.
• Scanning for authentication vulnerabilities that can result in unauthorized access to systems.

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Database Vulnerability Scanning

Databases store an application’s data securely so that it processes and transmits it over a network. Hence, vulnerability scanning is essential to evaluate the security measures of databases that ensure the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of applications.

A compromised database causes critical damage to your organization, affecting its reputation, operations, and intellectual property. A vulnerability scanner tool will analyze a database, checking for issues like misconfigurations, weak authentication, lack of encryption, and more.

SQL injection is a major threat to security as it primarily targets databases to modify or steal data. Security audits help uncover such attack vectors and help organizations protect their data. For web applications, SQL injection is the main source of vulnerabilities, as per Statista.

The scanning of databases helps assess its security posture and uncover loopholes that your organization can eliminate before an attacker exploits them.

Analyzing databases for potential security risks is important for:

• Preventing attackers from modifying the data.
• Controlling data servers.
• Accessing sensitive data.
• Intruding deep inside the network from data servers.

Cloud Vulnerability Scanner

Today, cloud deployment has become a vital business strategy to avail the benefits of a scalable and cost-effective IT infrastructure. While adopting the cloud carefully can help your organization enhance security posture, it can even introduce some risks that you should be aware of to tackle cloud security challenges.

Since cloud security is a shared responsibility, taking the right measures is essential to protect data and applications when operating in the cloud. Therefore, vulnerability scanning of cloud deployment for common security weaknesses is vital to gaining insights into the potential threat landscape.

There are four kinds of cloud vulnerabilities as identified by the U.S. National Security Agency.

• Misconfigurations: Common mistakes in settings and configurations that lead to security holes.
• Shared Tenancy Vulnerabilities: Risks arising from improper segmentation of different organization’s data and resources.
• Poor Access Control: Inadequate security policies and processes to protect unauthorized access.
• Supply Chain Vulnerabilities: Security threats that accompany software or hardware of the cloud infrastructure before the service provider acquires them.

Continuous vulnerability assessments can help you ensure the security of cloud infrastructure. However, as cybersecurity threats rise in range and complexity, you need a robust strategy like CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management).

Authenticated vs Unauthenticated Scanning

When it comes to the types of vulnerability scanning, we can also divide it into authenticated and unauthenticated scanning. Well, authenticated vulnerability scanning or credentialed scanning involves performing security audits on applications, networks, and systems using valid credentials.

These scans offer deep analysis, checking even admin and user portals for web applications. Consequently, it helps detect more security flaws as the scanning scope is expanded. On the other hand, unauthorized scanning lacks this depth, and it only checks the publicly available information.

As a result, unauthenticated vulnerability scanning fails to detect threats present on a deeper level as it leaves some areas of an application unchecked. Hence, these scans aren’t appropriate for a comprehensive security assessment and posture management strategy.

So, you must consider the differences between authenticated scanning and unauthenticated scanning to perform security audits optimally.

Key Considerations When Choosing Vulnerability Scanners

Quality vulnerability scanning requires a good tool that can thoroughly analyze your applications or other digital assets. There are different types of vulnerability scanners with diverse features and benefits out there. So, making a choice for your project, like testing web apps for vulnerabilities, seems a hard nut to crack. But it shouldn’t be difficult if you know where to start. Let’s check out some essential considerations that you must keep in mind when choosing a vulnerability scanning tool.

Wider Coverage

Surface-level scanning cannot uncover all potential risks, resulting in inefficient threat detection. Your organization needs a robust tool that offers wider coverage to CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), including those mentioned in the OWASP Top 10 and SANS 25.

The tool should also perform tests that are aligned with major compliance standards such as PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO27001, and more. It ensures that your organization meets mandated regulations and compliances for data security and privacy.

Scan Protected Areas

You need a solution that can navigate behind login screens to uncover threats hidden deep inside the target structure. It will provide in-depth insights into the threat landscape, allowing your organization to mitigate cyber threats more effectively.

Continuous Scanning

As new software updates, configurations, and patches are frequently released, you need a solution that offers continuous scanning to ensure secure deployment. It should seamlessly integrate into the development environment to continuously scan updates and changes for vulnerabilities before deployment in production.

Prioritized Reports

Prefer a vulnerability scanner that generates actionable and prioritized reports that can simplify the remediation process. The reports should offer clear insights into the severity of threats and remediation guidance to quickly resolve security issues.

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Detect Vulnerabilities Efficiently with ZeroThreat

In a nutshell, there are different kinds of vulnerability scanning, as you’ve seen in this blog. Each of these scanning offers distinct advantages, allowing you to detect and eliminate a variety of vulnerabilities. You need a robust security assessment tool to perform thorough scanning to uncover vulnerabilities precisely.

ZeroThreat’s advanced AI-powered vulnerability scanning helps you detect more threats with 98.9% accuracy. It allows you to detect vulnerabilities in web apps and APIs by scanning them in minutes, reducing your efforts in manual pen tests by up to 90%. It can identify out-of-band vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits.

With zero configuration and seamless integration into CI/CD pipelines, it helps proactively detect and remediate vulnerabilities within the development environment. Its precision, ease of use, and quality service make ZeroThreat a must-have tool for security audits.

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