Common Vulnerabilities detected in Vulnerability Scanning

Hackers are always nearby, ready to attack when you least expect it. They can ruin a business you’ve worked hard to build in just one night. Imagine that you’ve created a cutting-edge web application that’s generating excitement in the market. Just as you’re gearing up to celebrate your success, a hacker is already digging into your app, searching for a vulnerability to exploit.

Indeed securing your business from threats is vital for sustaining in this highly competitive marketplace of software products. For the same, not just one rather you must be multiple steps ahead of the threat actors.

Vulnerability scanning is a security evaluation technique which assists you in understanding the current security posture of your application as well as its infrastructure. This helps you in taking more informed decisions and prioritizing the operations necessary to keep your business long running on the go.

This blog is around the vulnerabilities, assessment, and the best vulnerability management practices.

Top 5 vulnerabilities listed in vulnerability scanning

1. Unpatched software

Unpatched software is defined as programs or systems that have identified security weaknesses which are still not being fixed via updates or patches.

These vulnerabilities, if exploited, have the ability to penetrate the security of the affected system.

As soon as software makers find and admit these vulnerabilities, fixes are created to deal with the identified risky situations. It is critical to maintain systems up to date and fixed using a consistent patch management approach.

Failure to do so might expose systems to possible exploitation, since threat actors frequently become aware of vulnerabilities before fixes are issued.

2.Security misconfigurations

Security misconfigurations are very common in cloud systems, and they are frequently rated as the cloud's top vulnerability.

A security misconfiguration happens when systems or applications are poorly defined or important configurations are missing. This exposes the system to risks and allows for illegal entry or exploitation.

Open ports, unsecured APIs, and improper permission management are the primary causes or the entry points to data breaches. Vulnerability scanning helps to find incorrect configuration of servers, databases, and cloud environments.

3.Weak or default credentials

Weak or default credentials are a frequent security weakness that hackers may exploit with little effort.

Passwords which are common, short in characters, default by the system, or easily guessable from a combination of possible passwords are commonly known as weak passwords.

These vulnerabilities commonly cause unauthorized access or even compromise of the full system.

4.Input validation flaws

This is a group of vulnerabilities which arises due to lack of proper checks for user inputs or network data.

This results in showing unintended or unauthorized data to the least privileged users. Threat actors leverage this vulnerability to gain access to the sensitive data stored in the databases of the web applications (commonly).

Cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection are the common vulnerabilities under this category.

5.Missing security configurations

It occurs when the systems, servers, or applications lack necessary security configurations such as SSL or TLS protocols.

This results in failure to ensure sensitive data encryption during the transit, exposing to attacks such as Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks, data breaches, or unauthorized access.

In addition to this, the lack of web application security headers such as the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), Content Security Policy (CSP), or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) adds additional risks to the vulnerability leading to severe attacks such as clickjacking or cross-site scripting (XSS).

Types of Penetration Testing Services for Enterprise-Level Security

Importance of vulnerability scanning

More than a technical evaluation and mandated by compliances such as PCI DSS, SOC 2 or ISO 27001, vulnerability scanning is more of a strategic measure. Basically, vulnerability scanning helps your organization to:

1. Early detection of vulnerabilities

Since vulnerability scanning is proactive in nature, it helps to detect and remediate vulnerabilities earlier than being exploited by any threat actor.

2.Manage cloud vulnerabilities

The greater expanse of cloud technology adoption and hybrid environments relating to the same demands then need to monitor associated threats. Cloud vulnerability management tools and techniques help greatly to secure even the dynamic cloud resources.

3.Comply with security standards

Many compliance audits demand detailed vulnerability assessment reports. Vulnerability scanning helps your firms to comply with industry data privacy rules and regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

4.Mitigate risk cost effectively

Earlier resolution of risks saves a hefty amount of resources in terms of financials, technical as well as human talents. Also, it reduces the cost of incident response and issues from operational downtime caused by data breaches.

5.Improve network security

Periodic vulnerability scanning helps to ensure your organization has a secure network which is resilient even against most-modern threats. Also, it helps to reinforce the overall security posture of your assets and the infrastructure.

Top 7 Vulnerability management tools used by experts

Choosing the right vulnerability management solution is indeed a greater challenge. By leveraging the right combination of tools, you will be able to improve your organizational security posture greatly while improving your client reputation and goodwill.

As per data sourced from Gartner Peer Insight’s review and rating, following are the top seven vulnerability management tools used by experts:

1. InsightVM by Rapid7
2. Tenable Nessus by Tenable
3. Qualys VMDR by Qualys
4. Tenable Vulnerability Management by Tenable
5. Tenable Security Center by Tenable
6. Tripwire IP360 by Fortra
7. GFI LanGuard by Aurea SMB Solutions (GFI Software)

An effective vulnerability management tool should be able to cover the following key features, which meets your requirements, even if it is compliance or ensuring secure assets simply.

Automated Penetration Testing vs Manual Penetration Testing : Pros, Cons and Key differences

1. Comprehensive asset discovery

End to end visibility of your infrastructure is the most important and a cornerstone when it comes to determining the effectiveness of vulnerability management.

Most of the modern tools come with automatic discovery and cataloging capabilities of all the assets in your network, that includes on-premise systems, cloud resources, containers, and even IoT devices.

2. Continuous and automated vulnerability scanning

Automated vulnerability scanning tools run regular scans on your systems to detect flaws in real time. They identify known vulnerabilities, outdated programs, configuration errors, and compliance gaps without any of the human interaction.

3. Risk based prioritization

Advanced technologies, such as artificial and threat intelligence prioritize vulnerabilities based on factors of how exploitable they are and their potential commercial impact.

This enables you to concentrate on critical issues and reduce time-to-remediation (TTR) significantly.

4. Seamless integration

Vulnerability management tools should have necessary provisions and features to integrate with the DevSecOps pipelines, ticketing systems, and SIEM solutions, that helps to enable the automated workflows. This reduces lots of process complications and cross functions while ensuring effective addressing of vulnerabilities in your systems precisely.

5. Compliance and reporting

Being provided with standardized compliance reports as mandated by various regulatory frameworks such as SOC 2, GDPR, and PCI DSS helps you to understand the efficiency of your security efforts while streamlining the audit process.

Best practices for effective vulnerability management

Vulnerability management is a cornerstone of every organization’s cybersecurity posture. Making it well structured helps your business to identify, prioritize, and remediate loopholes precisely.

Following are a few of the key best practices for effective vulnerability management:

Ensure continuous monitoring:

Continuous monitoring helps to detect and address threats as soon as they come into notice.

Automated security tools can be used to ensure continuous vulnerability monitoring of your systems, applications, and network. It provides real-time alerts and updates, track changes, detect anomalies, and ensure quicker response by the team.

Adopting continuous monitoring rather than periodic checks helps you ensure you are aware of latest threats and detect them with time.

Vulnerability scanning:

Vulnerability scanning is critical in effective vulnerability management. It helps to identify security gaps, outdated software versions, poor configurations, and missed patches.

Regular vulnerability scanning helps your organization to stay up to date while ensuring the proper identification of vulnerabilities which might be missed in the previous scans.

Patch management:

Patching the found vulnerabilities is as important as finding them. An effective patch management helps ensure the same.

Having a structured process starting from identification and deployment of patches upon all the systems in the organization helps reduce the possibilities of a threat actor exploiting the known vulnerabilities towards keeping the business secure.

Also, prioritizing patch deployment based on the severity of vulnerabilities is considered a good practice.

Incident response plan:

Incident response plan is the outline of steps for a future event of threat. It should include necessary procedures to detect, contain, eradicate, and recover from a breach incident.

It involves the phases of breach identification, detecting suspicious activity, containing breach from spreading further in the network, eradication, and restoring systems to normal state.

An effective response plan reduces the downtime, impact of the breach, and to have greater insights from each security event.

Employee training and awareness:

Having a sound and strong technical defenses comes to the ground since humans are the most vulnerable asset in every organization.

Attackers leverage manipulative tactics such as phishing emails and social engineering to gain access to the enterprise by exploiting the employees. Educating them and making them aware of the ongoing trends related to the same is an effective way to control risks from such incidents.

Making them informed on common attack types along with following the best practices for sensitive information handling, securing devices, and having good online behaviour.

Also, raising awareness on the importance of strong password practices, identification of red flags in communication, and reporting suspicious activities should be done within the organizations widely.

Vulnerability scanning vs penetration testing

Vulnerability scanning uses a software application to identify vulnerabilities in your systems' security or performance, such as networks, PCs, programs, and mobile devices.

A vulnerability assessment does not involve active attempts to gain access to your device, application, or network, whereas a penetration test will always involve an attempt to bypass your digital defenses.

It provides quantifiable measures that evaluate the possible hazards to your data and systems if a breach attempt occurs. And also can help you determine which assets are at danger if a threat actor accesses your system.

Since vulnerability scanning involves a series of operations that expose flaws in your system, you will also be able to prevent further attacks. In addition to increasing system security, it also can help you build a good reputation with competitors, clients, and third-party suppliers who are interested in working with you.

Penetration testing can be much more intrusive than a vulnerability scan, resulting in a denial of service and increased system utilization, which can impair productivity and corrupt equipment.

It helps to determine if the program objectives set by the key decision makers of your organizations had been met, such as efficient data loss prevention system setup and greatest possible uptime with least disruptions.

Both vulnerability scanning and penetration testing have a few common points to share. As known, both identify vulnerabilities in your systems proactively and are capable of detecting and revealing connections between various network components, applications, and certain sensitive data which you must protect more cautiously.

Major differences between vulnerability scanning and penetration testing are as follows:

Conclusion

Vulnerability scanning is an extremely important technique when it comes to proactive threat detection in your network, systems and applications. It is indeed essential for detecting and managing risks in today's complicated cybersecurity ecosystem.

You can strengthen their security posture, protect sensitive data, and maintain compliance with industry requirements by implementing a proactive vulnerability management strategy.

However it comes with its own drawbacks such as the snapshot effect. The vulnerabilities which exist during the scan are only captured which makes it miss the new issues that came into existence afterwards.