Signs That Your Vulnerability Assessment Needs a Reboot

Vulnerability Assessment is a process that defines, identifies, and prioritizes vulnerabilities in the computer system. Vulnerability assessment provides your organization the necessary knowledge, risk background, and awareness, and makes you react to threats when it comes to the environment.

Most often security professionals do not know how to approach vulnerability assessment when they need to do some automated report which is very much valuable for the organization. This is an excellent opportunity to show your strategic perspective on cybersecurity threats.

Four-Step Guide to Vulnerability Assessment:

This assessment is a manual tool, and this process is a four-step method. If your system does not follow these steps, your evaluation needs to reboot. Get the guide below:

1. Initial Assessment: Here, the user has to identify and define the assets and risks. This is a critical value of each device which is based on the client input. The device can be a security assessment vulnerability scanner and is very important to identify the device you will test. Only an authorized person must access this device. The user needs to understand a few strategic factors, including risk tolerance level, risk appetite, residual risk treatment, business impact analysis, etc.
2. System Baseline Definition: In this step, the user gathers information about the system before the vulnerability assessment. You need to review that the device has one port, service, and process so that it does not open. You also need to take the driver’s approval and that particular software that has to be installed in the device. This is the fundamental configuration for each device.    You need to try to perform and grab the “public” information, which has to be accessible based on the configuration baseline. There is a device that sends logs to the security information and SIEM platform. Some other records are available, which are stored in the central repository. It gathers public information regarding vulnerability performance, vendor, version, and further relevant details.

3. Perform the Vulnerability Scan: In this, the user needs to use the right policy that can act as a scanner and provide the desired result. Before you start a vulnerability scan, you need to look for compliance requirements. This is completely based on the company’s posture, and there is the best time to perform the scan. It is very important to recognize the client’s industry to ensure that the scan will perform and everything will go as per the required segment. One significant step is to re-define the policy with approval while performing the vulnerability scan. If you want the best result you need to use the vulnerability assessment-related tool, including best scan, quick scan, firewall scan, aggressive scan, and so on. Sometimes the user needs to perform the manual scan when critical assets enter to make sure the best result. You also need to be sure about the credential configuration to perform better during vulnerability assessment. However, you need to share the credentials with the team.

4. Vulnerability Assessment Report Creation: This is the fourth and last step that mainly works for report creation. The user needs to pay attention to detail to add extra value for the recommendation phase. You can get the real value from the final report and all recommendations have to be based on the initial goals. It is important that users use risk mitigation techniques that are completely based on the criticality of the results and assets. You also need to add the findings related to filling the gap between the system baseline and results. You are making deviations between the misconfiguration and discoveries. All recommendations are correct, and those have to get deviated and mitigate with the possible vulnerabilities. Users will have the findings on exposure, and they are very useful and ensure the understanding of the findings.

Anyways, there are few things that are very important to keep in mind and those are high in vulnerability. It should have detailed reports, which include the discovery date, vulnerability name, affected systems, the proof concept of vulnerability, and much more.

Final thoughts:

Above all, you are getting the essential list that shows the performance of vulnerability assessment. This is the recommendation phase reflecting the complete understanding of the security posture in the different aspects of the process. Though it is a complicated tool, it delivers everything with a better outcome. Get your security posture evaluated by Indusface today.