Why are Continuous Scans Important for Vulnerability Management?

To protect against evolving digital threats, organisations must have a proactive approach to tackling them. Unfortunately, many businesses do not treat cyber security as an ongoing process. Although your systems may be secure today, tomorrow a hacker may discover a critical vulnerability in your systems. Scary huh? Although this is an unsettling thought, we are on not in the businesses off scaremongering. As Cyber Security experts we work alongside our customers to help them implement the necessary processes and controls to prevent this worst-case scenario. 

Should my business be running vulnerability scans?

As part of a wider security strategy, organisations should be running continuous vulnerability scans to pick up on new and emerging cyber threats. As you start to proactively monitor the security of your business-critical applications, you will have a clearer idea about where you need to focus your security efforts. Once you understand where these gaps are in your security posture, you can begin to harden the security of those devices as well as implement further controls.

To become resilient against cyber threats, you must always remain one step ahead of a hacker. When it comes to network vulnerabilities this is no mean feat. While your security teams need to find and patch all hardware and software flaws every time, cyber criminals only need to find one unpatched flaw in your security armour to leverage a fully-fledged cyber-attack.

If there were no vulnerabilities within your internal systems, there would be nothing for hackers to exploit. However, vulnerabilities almost always exist within applications because software is developed by people and people make mistakes.

To minimise this window of opportunity for attackers, you should be running vulnerability scans at least once a month and patching security flaws accordingly. Although there are some compliance requirements which recommend you run scans on a quarterly basis, this is not regular enough to safeguard your data. You cannot adequately defend your infrastructure if you are not patching vulnerabilities faster than cyber criminals can find them.

How can organisations overcome this challenge?

It may seem like a mammoth task to understand the implications of every vulnerability and carefully plan patch management for each one. However, with a combination of advanced vulnerability tools alongside cyber expertise it is easily manageable.

As part of your vulnerability management strategy you need to continuously identify and remediate vulnerabilities in your business-critical applications. But how can you do this without putting too much strain your security teams? The simple answer is: automation and advanced threat intelligence.

The best vulnerability management tools

AppCheckNG is a best-in-class Web Application and Infrastructure vulnerability scanner. Designed and developed by experienced penetration testers, it provides the capability to carry out regular scans to identify vulnerabilities which, if left unchecked, could quickly become a significant business risk.

AppCheck features

• Automation
• With the AppCheck vulnerability scanning tool you can automate the discovery of security flaws within your websites, applications, network, and cloud infrastructure.
• Vulnerability ranking
• Classify and rank assets based on their true risk to your organisation and identify owners for each system. Establish a scan frequency that allows asset owners to track the progress of remediation efforts and identify emerging risks based on new intelligence.
• The AppCheck dashboard
• The AppCheck dashboard provides a customisable, real-time view of your security posture. This shows the status of discovered vulnerabilities, emerging threats and the progress of remediation.
• Workflow management system
• You can assign individual findings to a specific member of the team. The progress of the remediation can then be easily tracked through the main dashboard.
• Meaningful prioritisation
• Rather than being bombarded by meaningless alerts, you can score and prioritise vulnerabilities in order of importance/ severity.

Tripwire

Tripwire IP360™ enables organisations to keep up with the thousands of new vulnerabilities reported each year. With Tripwire you can identify system vulnerabilities through advanced intelligence that prioritises the most critical issues and how to fix them.

Tripwire IP360 covers on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. It discovers and profiles all your assets and the applications they’re running. In addition to agentless scanning, Tripwire IP360 uses agent-based vulnerability management (ABVM). Combining agent-based and agentless scanning means you can expect faster scanning results while consuming less network bandwidth.

You can also get:

• Full network visibility-Discover and profile all assets on your network.
• Meaningful scoring- Prioritise based on the needs of your organisation or agency.
• Increased productivity- Minimise manual effort through integration with existing tools and processes.