What are the Different Types of Vulnerability Assessment?

Quick Summary: Vulnerability assessment is a critical process, and there are different types of it to address a myriad of security challenges. Stick to this blog, if you want to know these types and learn more about vulnerability assessment. Keep reading for all the details.

With the constant rise in cybersecurity threats, organizations need effective measures to defend their IT assets against these threats. In fact, the stats show that the average cost of a data breach is $4.88 million, which is a real cause for concern for organizations.

Moreover, in most cases, successful hacking attacks happen due to vulnerabilities in your systems. Hence, vulnerability assessment is a crucial process for organizations to help them ensure that their systems are secure. There are different types of vulnerability assessments that aim to discover weaknesses in various digital assets.

In this blog, we will explore more about vulnerability assessment and its types. Let’s dig into the details.

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Overview of Vulnerability Assessment

It is a process to evaluate systems and applications to identify security loopholes or flaws. Vulnerabilities are the major reasons for security breaches. These are the weaknesses that arise due to design or implementation flaws. Finding and fixing these vulnerabilities is crucial to securing your systems and applications. Vulnerability assessment involves identifying vulnerabilities and determining their severity level.

It is a four-step process as follows:

• Asset Discovery: First, you must decide what needs to be assessed or scanned for vulnerabilities. There are various tools that can automatically discover all public facing systems and the devices connected with them.
• Vulnerability Scanning: Scan the target asset to detect zero-day, third-party, and other types of vulnerabilities.
• Vulnerability Assessment: Categorize the vulnerabilities based on severity level and build a remediation plan.
• Vulnerability Remediation: Patch security issues and ensure there are no more such issues.

How Does Vulnerability Assessment Work?

Vulnerability assessment is a comprehensive process which covers many important elements. You must check it out to learn about the ideal way carrying out vulnerability assessment.

Discovery

In the discovery phase, vulnerability scanning tools or manual methods are used to capture potential vulnerabilities in the system such as security misconfiguration, outdated software, and code flaws.

Analysis

After assessing the vulnerabilities, they are further analyzed to determine their severity, potential impact, and the risk they are capable of posing to the business. It’s determined by checking vulnerabilities against databases like CVE and assessing their exploitability.

Prioritization

Analyzation of vulnerabilities helps organizations decide to prioritize vulnerabilities on the basis of factors like severity, criticality of the affected assets, and exploitability. This streamlines the process of fixing vulnerabilities by deciding their priority and impact on business.

Reporting

Detailed reports are created, which outline the assessed vulnerabilities, their risk levels, and recommended remediation steps. These reports are optimized by IT and security teams to address the issues.

Remediation

Once the process of reporting is completed, the respective teams start the process of fixing identified vulnerabilities through patches, configuration changes, or other corrective actions.

Verification

Once the required steps are taken to assess potential vulnerabilities, the system is re-evaluated to ensure that vulnerabilities have been effectively addressed and no new issues have been introduced.

Different Types of Vulnerability Assessments

Vulnerability assessment aims to uncover security weaknesses in applications, networks, and systems with automated scanning. Let’s understand various vulnerability assessment types below.

Application Scanning

Application vulnerability assessment helps to discover security weaknesses in software applications like web apps, mobile apps, and desktop applications. There can be manual or automated assessments to identify vulnerabilities. It helps to find known security weaknesses and misconfigurations.

Often, applications have various hidden defects that pose different security challenges. For example, OWASP Top 10 defines the vulnerabilities that are pervasive in web applications. Attackers can manipulate source code, interfere with the application’s operation, steal data, or do any other damage by exploiting these vulnerabilities.

Network-based Scans

A comprehensive vulnerability assessment for your network helps to discover weaknesses in systems based on wired or wireless networks. It scans the entire IT environment to assess the risk posture by identifying vulnerabilities. Identifying the loopholes that attackers can exploit to penetrate your IT environment helps you understand how a possible attack might unfold. It enables you to create a robust shield for your network defenses.

Wireless Scans

It includes analyzing the security of ports and policies to identify loopholes in public and/or private wireless networks. The scanning of wireless devices connected to the network also falls in its ambit. Wireless scans help to detect security risks and protect data sent and received via wireless networks in an organization.

Database Scanning

These are the security scans performed on databases to identify weak spots. Detecting potential weaknesses that can lead to attacks like SQL injection helps to improve security. Databases hold crucial user information and require thorough security assessment to protect the data.

Host-based Scans

Host-based scans find vulnerabilities in network hosts like workstations and servers. These types of vulnerability assessment involve scanning ports and services to avoid port attacks. It also provides information on patch history and configuration settings.

API Vulnerability Scanning

Performing automated scans or manual testing to identify security weaknesses is known as API vulnerability assessment. It involves identifying and testing API endpoints to ensure a secure flow of data. The assessment helps to discover exploitable flaws in APIs to prevent cyberattacks.

There are many vulnerability scanning tools that help to detect API vulnerabilities for SOAP, RESTful, GraphQL, and other types of APIs. Usually, these tools discover common security risks like OWASP API Top 10.

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Why Should You Consider Vulnerability Assessment?

Imagine you have an application with a critical vulnerability that enables a hacker to gain unauthorized access to it. It’s not hard to understand the potential consequences of this security breach.

The hacker would be able to steal data, disrupt application operations, and do other damage in this scenario. This is just one kind of worst-case scenario; there are other consequences that can negatively impact your business.

In 2024, around 29,004 vulnerabilities have been reported and published in the CVE records. Although you can have the strongest security posture, a single vulnerability is enough to undermine its strength.

Vulnerability assessment helps you overcome these challenges and mitigate the security risks. The following are the advantages of vulnerability assessment.

• Finding and understanding the severity of vulnerabilities helps you create a solid remediation plan.
• It helps to validate the effectiveness of the current security posture and identify any flaws.
• You can identify existing flaws and prevent any future attacks.
• With improved security, you can earn customers' trust and confidence.
• It helps to comply with standards and security regulations that might apply.
• You can avoid costly data breaches and lawsuits by finding and resolving vulnerabilities.

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Final Note

Keeping your systems and applications secure is the need of the hour and the role of vulnerability assessment cannot be underestimated. However, when it comes to assessing the security of your systems or applications, using a suitable vulnerability scanner is also important.

You can leverage an intelligent AI-driven vulnerability scanner like ZeroThreat to uncover potential security issues quickly and precisely. It can help you detect all known and unknown vulnerabilities like Zero-day and out-of-band vulnerabilities.