Updated April 19, 2023
Definition of Vulnerability Assessment Tools
Vulnerability assessment tools play a very important role to detect any vulnerability that can be caused due to security breaches, system crashes, the intrusion of unwanted activities, and many more. These tools help in mitigating all the risks and search the root cause of Vulnerability by assessing and creating some solutions to fix it. Some threats which can ask for the aid of vulnerability assessment tools include XSS, SQL injection or any other code injection attack, some fault-prone authentication mechanism, a system with poor security permissions, and third-party intrusions. Vulnerability assessment tools automatically try to resolve these threats with their inbuilt components.
Vulnerability Assessment Tools
- There are many vulnerability assessment tools available but then it’s important to select which is best suitable for which type of risk or attack. Vulnerability tools help in making the assessment for threat or risk easier.
- These tools are designed in a way where they can automatically detect and scan the entire threat and then provide a solution which can target the application for working.
- It is considered good practice if these vulnerability assessment tools are already pre-installed then all the critical IT resources can be escaped from all these threats and risks.
- There are various types of Vulnerability assessment tools which are as follows :
# Protocol Scanners: This tool is used for searching all the vulnerable protocols, ports, network, and services which are used while surfing the website or any other application related protocols.
# Network Scanners: This tool is used for scanning and searching all the threats related to the network mostly and then help to visualize the network by discovering some warning signals like spoofed IPs, suspicious packet, intrusion and other sniffing and spoofing over the network.
# Web Application Scanners: This tool is used for analyzing and scrutinizing mostly all the website-related applications for the scanners to work upon.
- There are many types of Vulnerability Assessment which is very much important to rescue and remediate including various threats like SQL injection, XSS, and other code injection threats.
- Code injection threat needs to be taken care of mainly to avoid duplicates and data hampering.
- At times user tries to put some unwanted data within the database and some other data which is not at all required then at that time some faulty authentication mechanisms arise thus making the vulnerability more prone to it.
- Many times, the software when deployed and becomes ready for the migration might create some defaults and insecure settings with some passwords that can be guessed. Such a type of release into production is not required at all.
- There are several types of vulnerability assessment types that need to be handled using these tools which include host assessment, Network, and wireless assessment, Database assessment, Application Scans, Network intrusion.
- Host assessment vulnerability is caused due to the vulnerable attack which is speculated to be not adequately tested or might have generated due to the not-so-tested machine or the application on which host or the central server it is running upon.
- Database assessment is used for assessing any vulnerability that should not occur in databases or big datasets so before any release or testing in the database it is to be ensured these unwanted data, or sensitive information should have a proper structure, identification, and classification of sensitive data should occur properly.
- A network assessment is used for testing all the network-related components using network assessment tools while the application is hosted with different protocols, ports, and network switching or routing, etc.
- Application scans play a very major role in vulnerability assessment as they contain some very good tools which is relevant to every aspect of scrutinization and especially in web-based applications and their source code using automated scans on the front end or static and dynamic analysis of the entire source code and base code for migration.
- Basically, every Vulnerability assessment involves security as its lead role and it has some set of rules which needs to be implemented for solving the Security Scanning process and it has major four steps which are mandate: Vulnerability identification, Analysis, Risk assessment, and Remediation.
- Vulnerability identification involves an effective scrutinization of the entire applications comprising of security analysts for testing of security health and condition of application, servers, and other systems by identifying and then performing proper testing is quite effective in terms of satisfaction of vulnerabilities.
- Vulnerability analysis is required to find out the root cause once the identification is done for the vulnerability to occur.
- Risk assessment is the next step to vulnerability assessment as it helps in making the entire process of vulnerability assessment a little streamlined by prioritizing the factors and incorporating security analysts on top of it for analysis and mitigation.
- The factors involved in the assessment of risk include which systems are majorly affected, what kind of data associated is on risk, type of business function which is at risk, compromise, or ease of attack when it comes to analysis, type of damage associated with it.
- At last, one very essential step of remediation come into the picture all this is done to bridge the gap between staff, development, and operations team to work hand in hand.
- All the development once performed needs revision with the latest change request or patches on the existing application to make the application bug-free so both the challenges related to security and development can be taken care in the final step of remediation thus meeting with a new concept of DevSecops.
- There are many types of Vulnerability assessment tools available some are free of cost and open source and some are paid.
- These tools depend on the requirement whether the vulnerability assessment is related to network, web-based, system-based, cloud-based, etc. Some of the tools to name include:
- Nikto2
- Netsparker
- OpenVAS
- W3AF
- Arachni
- Nmap
- Acunetix
- OpenSCAP
- Intruder
- Comodo Hackerproof
- GoLismero
- Retina CS Community
- Aircrack
- Nexpose
- MBSA
- Nessus Professionals
- Solarwinds Network configuration manager
Conclusion
Vulnerability Assessment tools are quite significant and play a vital role especially the challenges are related to risk. All these Big organizations possessing large IT teams should always have good Vulnerability assessment tools to maintain the systems and security breaches which is not at all a want for either a developer or operational team.
Recommended Articles
This is a guide to Vulnerability Assessment Tools. Here we discuss the definition, various types of Vulnerability assessment tools. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –
