A Comprehensive Guide to Vulnerability Scanning

Quick Summary: Vulnerability scanning is essential for organizations to assess their digital landscapes and discover potential risks. Organizations can uncover various security loopholes that can pose a threat to the integrity and security of their digital assets. Get a comprehensive understanding of vulnerability scanning, its types, best practices, and more information in this blog.

In today’s digitally connected world, cyberattacks have become commonplace and widespread. You can hear the news of data compromises every now and then. In most cases, these cyber security incidents occur due to common vulnerabilities and exposures like misconfigurations, outdated software components, improper encryption, and more.

Vulnerabilities cause weaknesses in the security of applications, APIs, and other digital assets that internal or external threat vectors can exploit. Identifying and remediating these vulnerabilities is essential to eliminate these weaknesses and protect your digital assets. Vulnerability scanning helps uncover such weaknesses.

However, quality detection of vulnerabilities requires a robust vulnerability scanning tool. It can help identify vulnerabilities with great precision and a lower false positive rate. Keep reading to get a comprehensive understanding of vulnerability scanning and more information.

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A Quick Understanding of Vulnerability Scanning

Vulnerability scanning is a process of discovering security flaws in systems, applications, networks, and other IT resources that attackers can exploit to commit cybercrimes. It helps detect external and internal threat vectors.

A vulnerability is a security loophole that an attacker can exploit to gain unauthorized access or steal sensitive information. Cybersecurity issues are continuously rising as new vulnerabilities are being discovered.

As of August 2024, 52,000 new vulnerabilities and CVEs have been found, as per Statista’s report. This shows how vulnerabilities have become a critical challenge for organizations. Identifying and remediating these vulnerabilities is crucial to protect your digital assets.

Types of Vulnerability Scanning

Since there are different types of vulnerabilities, you need diverse approaches to identify them. The following are different vulnerability scanning types that help detect various security weaknesses.

Authenticated Scanning

Authenticated scanning involves evaluating applications, networks, or systems with valid credentials. It offers a holistic assessment of digital assets, uncovering vulnerabilities that are not visible otherwise. You can get deep insights into the threat landscape with authenticated scanning, as it can also analyze resources that are protected behind logins. Due to deeper scanning of digital assets, this method can uncover a wide range of vulnerabilities with greater accuracy.

Unauthenticated Scanning

Unauthenticated scanning is a type of vulnerability assessment that doesn’t require credentials to perform scans. It helps scan applications, systems, and networks externally without requiring specific access rights. These scans help detect vulnerabilities visible from outside by analyzing common misconfigurations, open ports, outdated software, and more. However, these scans fail to detect vulnerabilities present in resources secured with logins.

Network Vulnerability Scanning

Another type of vulnerability scan is network scanning. It involves analyzing the network infrastructure of an organization to identify security flaws and misconfigurations in servers, firewalls, workstations, routers, printers, and other resources. Network scans offer an in-depth analysis of the resources, exposing vulnerabilities before an attacker exploits them. Identifying these vulnerabilities helps protect against network-based threats such as DoS or DDoS attacks.

Web Application Scanning

It is a kind of vulnerability scanning that focuses on identifying vulnerabilities specifically in web applications or websites of an organization. It helps identify OWASP Top 10 and other vulnerabilities. These types of scans involve using automated tools to identify and pinpoint security weaknesses that attackers can exploit to obtain sensitive data.

API Vulnerability Scanning

API vulnerability scanning is a type of threat analysis that focuses on API endpoints. Modern organizations use thousands of APIs today. They also include shadow and zombie APIs that pose a critical security challenge for organizations. Vulnerability scanning for APIs helps discover all APIs existing in an organization. Plus, it helps uncover shadow and zombie APIs that attackers can exploit to steal data or infect a victim’s system.

Different Risks Detected with Vulnerability Scanning

There are different types of vulnerabilities that pose a security challenge for organizations and individuals. Let’s check out these vulnerabilities below.

Misconfiguration

Misconfigurations arise when systems or applications aren’t properly configured causing potential loopholes in them. For example, if an application is set up with default settings or a feature is not properly configured, it opens doors to cybersecurity threats. Attackers can take advantage of misconfigurations to access sensitive data, disrupt services, or execute arbitrary code.

Unpatched Software

Outdated or unpatched software applications are among the key security vulnerabilities that pose a threat to both individuals and organizations. They lead to known security loopholes that attackers can exploit to run arbitrary codes or steal sensitive data.

Improper Encryption

The next security vulnerability is improper encryption. This type of vulnerability occurs when encryption is not implemented at all or isn’t strong enough to protect against cyber threats. Poor encryptions occur due to weak encryption keys like DES that use 56 bits only for encryption. So, it doesn’t offer sufficient protection against cyberattacks.

Weak Credentials

Default and easily guessed passwords are a critical vulnerability that attackers often exploit. Attackers can use techniques like brute forcing to crack passwords. Weak credentials help attackers access accounts or systems easily. It can be dangerous when an attacker gains access to a privileged account. After this, the attacker could access sensitive data or functionality that risks the integrity and security of an application or system. It can help identify OWASP API Security Top 10 vulnerabilities.

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What are the Different Steps to Perform Vulnerability Scanning?

There are different types of vulnerability scanning performed to uncover a variety of security threats. The following is a vulnerability scanning process that you can follow to uncover potential security risks.

Define the Objectives and Scope

Defining the scope and objectives of vulnerability scanning. You need to determine which assets, networks, or applications need to be evaluated for vulnerabilities.

Choose the Right Tool

The next step is to select the right vulnerability scanning tool. You need a reliable DAST tool to perform automated vulnerability scanning. Usually, organizations leverage multiple security assessment solutions to evaluate different kinds of IT assets like databases, network devices, endpoints, and cloud assets.

There are many types of open-source and commercial DAST tools to meet the needs of your organization. However, you need to evaluate different kinds of tools based on their compatibility, features, and capabilities.

Execute Vulnerability Scanning

Once you have defined the scope and target of vulnerability scanning, you can execute the task. You need to provide the URL of the target application or API to the DAST tool to perform a scan. The tool will thoroughly analyze the target and present a report with findings. The time it takes to perform vulnerability analysis depends on the depth and complexity of scanning.

Vulnerability Prioritization and Remediation

Once vulnerabilities have been discovered, they must be prioritized to identify the severity of the risk. You can remediate vulnerabilities once the risk has been identified. There are different ways of vulnerability remediation to minimize the risks they pose.

Patching is a type of vulnerability remediation in which a patch or fix is provided to eliminate the risk. It involves providing updates to the existing version or launching a new version. Another method is to mitigate the likelihood or impact of a vulnerability.

It can be done by removing the vulnerable component(s). Not acting upon the found vulnerability is also a remediation method. This is a suitable option in the case when a vulnerability has a low-risk factor with a lower CVSS score and the cost of fixing the vulnerability is high.

Continuous Vulnerability Assessment

You should perform regular vulnerability scanning to continuously detect and remediate vulnerabilities. It will help you keep your systems and applications risk-free with continuous threat analysis. It will help them collect useful insights and data.

For example, repeated vulnerability scanning and remediation will help you understand which remediation technique works best.

Challenges Organizations Face in Vulnerability Scanning

Scanning your digital assets for vulnerabilities is a useful method as it helps uncover weaknesses that could become a potential threat. The following are the challenges that organizations face in vulnerability scanning.

False Positives and Negatives

A critical challenge in security assessments is false alarms that could complicate vulnerability remediation. False positives occur when vulnerabilities are detected but they actually don’t exist. This means that these are false alarms and could result in wasted resources.

On the other hand, false negatives occur when a vulnerability actually exists but isn’t detected by the vulnerability scanner. Both false positives and false negatives pose a critical challenge when it comes to the accuracy and quality of security testing.

Frequency of Scanning

Continuous threat assessment is pivotal for modern organizations to identify security risks early and protect digital assets. However, organizations fail to keep up with this trend and fall behind in regular scanning, which can leave scopes for potential threats.

Frequent scanning is essential to identify newly discovered vulnerabilities, zero-day exploits, and other such threats. It helps address these vulnerabilities on time before they become a serious challenge for your organization.

Unmanaged Assets

An organization's attack surface expands as technology grows, leaving many unmanaged assets. It opens new potential entry points. Suppose there is a landing page that was previously used for a marketing campaign that is not in the inventory of applications and websites that the security team scans and protects. As a result, this unmanaged asset can be an entry point for attackers to launch a cyberattack.

Complex Infrastructure

With the growth in the technological landscape of an organization, its IT ecosystem becomes more complex with diverse on-premises systems, APIs, endpoint devices, and the cloud. Scanning the digital assets for vulnerabilities becomes more challenging in this case.

In this case, organizations need a multi-faceted approach that includes various strategies like regular vulnerability management, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), endpoint scanning, and more.

Vulnerability Scanning Best Practices for Quality Outcomes

Assessing your digital assets for vulnerabilities is pivotal in ensuring a robust security posture. However, quality scanning is crucial to get actionable results that help mitigate the risks. Follow the below best practices to ensure quality scanning.

• Adhere to a consistent scanning schedule to uncover security threats frequently. It will help your organization stay abreast of emerging risks by detecting them as early as possible.
• Leverage a shift-left approach for security testing by performing vulnerability scanning early and frequently in the SDLC to deliver secure applications.
• Enhance your scan coverage by analyzing assets that are secured behind logins. It will help you identify the depth of the attack surface.
• Establish a framework for scanning and adhere to it throughout the process for a streamlined approach. It defines the steps and documents them.
• Prioritizing the patching process based on the severity of vulnerabilities helps increase effectiveness.
• You can leverage multiple approaches for your organization, involving automated scans and manual pen testing, to get optimum results.

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Mitigate Risks with ZeroThreat’s Advanced Vulnerability Scanning

Vulnerabilities are a major security threat for organizations because they serve as an entry point for attackers. Hence, identifying and removing these vulnerabilities is a top priority to tighten the security of digital assets.

ZeroThreat’s advanced vulnerability scanning capabilities offer enhanced threat assessment. It can uncover vulnerabilities that most tools fail to detect, such as zero-day exploits and out-of-band vulnerabilities.

With a near-zero false positives rate, ZeroThreat can help uncover vulnerabilities with greater accuracy. It offers in-depth security assessments of web apps and APIs. Using this tool is easy because it works with zero configuration.

It offers actionable reports with remediation guidance that help security teams ensure a safe and resilient defense shield. Learn more about it and know how it can help protect your digital assets.