Mind the Gap – How to Ensure Your Vulnerability Detection Methods are up to Scratch

With global cybercrime costs expected to reach $10.5 trillion
annually by 2025, it comes as little surprise that the risk of
attack is companies’ biggest concern globally. To help businesses
uncover and fix the vulnerabilities and misconfigurations affecting
their systems, there is an (over)abundance of solutions
available.

But beware, they may not give you a full and continuous view of
your weaknesses if used in isolation. With huge financial gains to
be had from each successful breach, hackers do not rest in their
hunt for flaws and use a wide range of tools and scanners to help
them in their search. Beating these criminals means staying one
step ahead and using the most comprehensive and responsive
vulnerability detection support you can.

We’ll go through each solution and explain how you can maintain
your vigilance. Of course, vulnerability management is just one
step businesses must take to prevent a breach; there’s also proper
asset management, employee training, and incident response to
consider, but this article will cover scanning and penetration
testing specifically.

Vulnerability scanning

A vulnerability scanner^[1]
checks your systems for security flaws that can be used to steal
data or sensitive information or generally cause disruption to your
business. Depending on your needs, you can deploy scanners to keep
an eye on any area of your system from your external or internal
infrastructure to your web apps and endpoints, as well as any
authenticated or unauthenticated areas of your website.

They do have their limitations, however.

Firstly, vulnerability scans can only ever report on what they
find at the moment. If you’re running them infrequently, then you
could easily miss new vulnerabilities that have been introduced in
between scans. This is why it’s important to ensure you have a
vulnerability management solution in place that can give you
continuous visibility of your systems and help you to prioritize
and fix any security issues.

And with some scanning vendors, there can also be a bit of a
waiting game to play while they release checks for new
vulnerabilities. This often happens when an exploit is made public
before a vulnerability’s details are. Fortunately, some solutions –
such as Intruder Vanguard^[2]
– take a faster, more proactive approach, finding the
proof-of-concept exploit, breaking it down, and then checking all
its customers – often before the scanning vendors have started
their checks.

The other challenge with some vulnerability scanning tools is
that they are often not tailored to your business and security
posture. This is because most have to be generic so that they can
be applied to any environment. Vulnerability scanners find it hard
to handle bespoke/custom services or applications because they
haven’t seen them before and therefore cannot extract meaningful
results. As a result, they can often produce false positives, which
in turn can lead to wasted time and resources trying to fix
non-existent issues.

To avoid this, you need a solution that takes into account your
specific environment i.e., the types of systems you have deployed,
the configuration of these systems, the data stored within them,
and the mitigating controls you have in place. Then, it needs to
use this information to ensure it only presents you with issues
that have a tangible impact on your security.

How can you make that possible? By adding human expertise.

While a scan will find a vulnerability and report it, it won’t
carry out a full “impact review” to show what the actual risk is of
someone successfully exploiting the vulnerability. Penetration
tests, however, will.

Penetration tests

A penetration test (also known as a pen test) is a simulated
cyber attack carried out by ethical hackers on your systems to
identify vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious
attackers. This helps you to understand not only what needs to be
fixed but also the potential impact of an attack on your
business.

However, there are major issues with using this as your sole
vulnerability detection method.

Firstly, while in-depth, penetration testing only covers a point
in time. With 20 new vulnerabilities identified every day, your
penetration test results are likely to be out of date as soon you
receive the report.

Not only that but reports can take as long as six months to
produce because of the work involved, as well as several months to
digest and action.

They can be very expensive – often costing thousands of pounds
each time.

With hackers finding more sophisticated methods to break into
your systems, what is the best modern solution to keep you one step
ahead?

A hybrid of vulnerability scanning and penetration
testing

In order to gain the most comprehensive picture of your security
posture, you need to combine automated vulnerability scanning and
human-led penetration testing.

Intruder Vanguard^[3]
does just that, bringing security expertise and continuous coverage
together to find what other scanners can’t. It fills the gap
between traditional vulnerability management and point-in-time
penetration tests, to provide a continuous watch over your systems.
With the world’s leading security professionals on hand, they’ll
probe deeper, find more vulnerabilities, and provide advisories on
their direct impact on your business to help you keep attackers at
bay.

The threat of attack is rising, don’t leave yourself vulnerable.
Choose continuous, comprehensive coverage from Intruder
Vanguard.