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What is a vulnerability analysis?

As organizations grow, so do their vulnerabilities. It could be a new set of employees. It could be a merger: the bigger the growth, the more complex the architecture.

Unpatched vulnerabilities can be directly responsible for data breaches. According to research, a staggering 60% of data breaches happened due to substandard patch management. It proves the utmost importance of a vulnerability assessment or analysis. 

The best way to mitigate risk is simple – find and patch the potential weaknesses before threat actors do. Identifying vulnerabilities beforehand should be a priority in any cybersecurity strategy. 

This article will help you understand vulnerability analysis and how it can help your organization stay one step ahead of threat actors.

What is vulnerability analysis?

Vulnerability analysis or assessment is a structured and systematic process for reviewing security weaknesses and identifying vulnerabilities in a network. It helps you understand a system’s susceptibility to any known vulnerabilities. 

You can then evaluate, rank, and create a mitigation strategy to strengthen your organization's security. 

There are various types of vulnerability assessments. Hence, each of them has multiple use cases. 

  • Application assessments determine vulnerabilities in web applications 
  • Network assessments review procedures and policies to protect against unauthorized access and attacks.
  • Database assessments help identify configuration shortcomings and unprotected data within the organization’s infrastructure.
  • Host assessments reveal breachable entry points in critical servers that impact operations and security if left unattended.

Combining different types of vulnerability tests will give you a better idea of a system’s vulnerabilities. Like any cybersecurity strategy, it is necessary to invest time and resources in vulnerability analysis to adapt policies against an evolving threat landscape.

Vulnerability analysis best practices

Either you have run vulnerability assessments before, or you are new to it. Regardless, you should keep up with best practices to get the most out of the analysis. 

Here is a checklist to ensure a thorough, productive vulnerability assessment:

Define desirable business outcomes in advance

It is okay to make pen tests and vulnerability scans mandatory, but you should spend more time on high-priority areas. You must define business goals to create the maximum desired impact. 

Some reasonable goals to start with:

  • Prioritizing risk management
  • Recalibrating and achieving compliance
  • Preventing or mitigating data breaches
  • Shortening recovery time

Prioritize before you assess

Yes, vulnerability assessments help you prioritize risks. But one more thing you should consider before an evaluation is your digital assets. 

Prioritizing your most valuable assets or components will ease pressure in an otherwise exhausting process. It allows you to manage your budget and resources and align your cybersecurity strategy with your business goals. 

Understanding the assessment types and outcomes is crucial to create a clear structure that complements existing security protocols.

Prepare for an assessment

As much as you and a thousand other IT professionals wish that were the case, these assessments rarely run themselves with a click of a button. 

As such, technical preparation is key to getting this part right:

  • Conduct meetings and brainstorm with your IT team
  • Construct an efficient threat model
  • Engage system developers
  • Verify and understand the test environment or landscape details

Review on the go

It is normal to find false positives in a vulnerability assessment. A manual check-up will ensure you do not waste time on a red herring

Record the steps you take. Collect evidence of the processes from beginning to end. These can help you explore and analyze the result more deeply.

Create detailed reports of each assessment

A vulnerability analysis is only as good as the quality of knowledge it renders. It is vital to create a detailed report of each assessment. This approach ensures that information is not lost and is shareable, repeatable, and actionable. 

Moreover, a detailed account of evaluations and outcomes helps you easily communicate issues to top management. 

Key components of the compilation include:

  • A complete and unbiased description of existing vulnerabilities
  • Risk levels of each vulnerability
  • Steps to mitigate them

Vulnerability assessments recalibrate your cybersecurity priorities. It will open your eyes to issues that might otherwise be easily overlooked. 

When security protocols tighten from your end, threat actors will evolve. So, continuously invest time and money to educate your team on the latest cybersecurity threats and how to overcome them. 

This war is challenging. With determination and enhanced cybersecurity hygiene, you can give yourself a better chance of mitigating foreseeable threats.



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