What is Vulnerability Analysis, and How Does It Work?

Did you know that 60% of all data breaches were made possible by unpatched vulnerabilities (Willis, V. 2019)? That staggering figure shows why a vulnerability assessment is critical to any cybersecurity strategy.

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There is no denying that every system has vulnerabilities. Detecting them quickly is key to properly identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating them. However, as organizational architecture grows more complex, it’s difficult to fully understand it without utilizing a systematic vulnerability analysis.

Read on to learn why vulnerability analysis is important and how it can be utilized to help your organization overcome its cybersecurity risks.

What Is Vulnerability Assessment?

The purpose of vulnerability analysis, or vulnerability assessment, is to create a structured process for discovering vulnerabilities in a system, prioritizing them, and creating a mitigation strategy. Cybersecurity professionals often use vulnerability analysis alongside other detection methods, such as penetration testing, to better understand an organization’s system and its most significant risks.

Since there are multiple uses of vulnerability analysis, there are many different types of assessments to choose from (Computer Security Resource Center, 2022):

◉ Application assessments to determine vulnerabilities within the web applications your organization uses.

◉ Network assessments that require a review of your procedures and policies to protect you against unauthorized access.

◉ Database assessments to discover configuration issues, unprotected data, and other vulnerabilities within your infrastructure.

◉ Host assessments to reveal vulnerabilities of your critical servers that could impact operations and security if not properly tested and protected.

Most organizations need to run a combination of these assessments regularly. As with most cybersecurity practices, you need to invest time into vulnerability assessments on a routine basis and adjust practices and policies accordingly as an organization’s architecture and cyberthreats evolve.

Vulnerability Assessment Checklist

Even if you’ve conducted vulnerability assessments in the past, staying up to date on the best practices of vulnerability assessment methodology helps you get the most out of the process. As such, here’s a checklist to follow that ensures an assessment is thorough, efficient, and productive (New York State Department of Health, 2022):

1. Define desirable business outcomes in advance: Some organizations make certain processes, such as pen tests and vulnerability assessments, mandatory and routine. That is okay, but desirable outcomes need to be defined before every assessment, or it may not be as productive or impactful as a team hopes. Prioritizing risks, achieving compliance, preventing data breaches, or reducing recovery time are all reasonable goals.

2. Prioritize before you assess: While a vulnerability assessment can help you prioritize risks, you must also prioritize your assets before moving forward. Conducting a thorough assessment can be an exhaustive process, especially for the first time, so you must first assess the most important components. This also means understanding the different types of assessments you can conduct and how to best structure them before you dive in.

3. Prepare for your assessment: Rarely is a vulnerability assessment run with the click of a button. Technical preparation involves conducting meetings, constructing a threat model, interviewing your system developers, and verifying the details of your test environment. Both passive and active vulnerability testing is valuable but knowing when and where to use each VA testing method is essential for success. In addition to knowing your testing options, you need to understand the environment you’re working in and the biggest risks you must prioritize, explore, and mitigate.

4. Review as you go: During the test, you must manually check your results to filter out false positives and prioritize true positives. It would help if you also recorded the steps taken and collected evidence to ensure that the process for getting a given result is fully understood and repeatable, as you’ll need to explore it more closely later.

5. Create detailed reports after each assessment: A vulnerability assessment is only as valuable as the knowledge it provides, so creating a comprehensive account alongside each assessment is critical to ensuring information is remembered, shared, and used to take action. A complete description of all vulnerabilities, associated risk levels, mitigation steps, and remedies should be compiled.

6. Invest in continued education and training: Aside from continuing your education through certification programs, retaining the results and reports of each vulnerability assessment you conduct proves valuable for teaching yourself and others how to better prevent and respond to incidents that may occur in the future. Detailed reports are also helpful in communicating issues to non-technical stakeholders, such as those in the C-suite who need to be aware of significant risks and strategies for dealing with them.

If you stick to these best practices the next time you plan a vulnerability assessment, you’re sure to get a lot more out of the process. Of course, getting to the point where you’re confident enough to conduct a vulnerability assessment takes knowledge and hands-on practice, which is why pursuing further education can help prepare you.

Vulnerability Analysis Tools

Conducting a vulnerability analysis is rarely fully automated, but it’s not completely manual. In most cases, while there will be some hands-on input from a security professional, you’ll also be leveraging various tools to discover vulnerabilities and learn more about them (University of North Dakota, 2022).

Some of the most common vulnerability analysis tools include:

◉ OpenVAS for All Systems: OpenVAS is one of the most far-reaching scanning tools as it covers not only web apps and web servers but also your network, operating systems, virtual machines, and databases. When vulnerabilities are discovered, the risk assessments and recommendations will help you decide what to do next.

◉ SolarWinds for Network Errors: SolarWinds offers a network configuration manager that allows vulnerability testing in areas many other tools don’t cover. By revealing misconfigured equipment on your network, SolarWinds can help you discover missing information about your system and the risks it is exposed to.

◉ Intruder for Cloud Storage: While Intruder is not free, it is a powerful tool for scanning cloud-based storage systems, and the best part is that it monitors constantly and scans automatically, ensuring vulnerabilities are detected as quickly as possible. It also offers recommendations and quality reports to guide your strategy.

◉ Nikto2 for Web Apps: If you’re looking for an open-source tool to help you scan web applications, Nikto2 is capable software that can alert you to web server vulnerabilities. The downside is that it does not offer any risk assessment features or recommendations, so you’ll have to decide what to do with the vulnerabilities that are found.

◉ Nexpose for New Vulnerabilities: Nexpose is another open-source tool that’s completely free to use to scan your web apps, devices, and networks. Plus, since it’s updated with the newest vulnerabilities every day via its active community, you can trust Nexpose to provide a reliable scanning solution. The tool also categorizes vulnerabilities based on risk, allowing you to focus on the most pressing issues.

In your work as a cybersecurity professional, you’ll likely come across all of these tools already being used by an organization or your colleagues. Of course, the list doesn’t stop here—there are dozens of other tools in the market like those listed above and finding the right one for your use case means spending some time familiarizing yourself with them.

Become a Vulnerability Analysis Expert

Whether you’ve conducted vulnerability assessments in the past, architecture, threats, and mitigation strategies evolve every day. That’s why investing in your continued education is essential to ensure you hold the most up-to-date and actionable knowledge.

You can confidently proceed with your next vulnerability assessment by pursuing a training program such as the Certified Ethical Hacker (C|EH) course from EC-Council. Interested in exploring the curriculum?

Source: eccouncil.org

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Potential Security Threats To Your Computer Systems

A computer system threat is anything that leads to loss or corruption of data or physical damage to the hardware and/or infrastructure. Knowing how to identify computer security threats is the first step in protecting computer systems. The threats could be intentional, accidental or caused by natural disasters.

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In this article, we will introduce you to the common computer system threats and how you can protect systems against them.

What is a Security Threat?

Security Threat is defined as a risk that which can potentially harm computer systems and organization. The cause could be physical such as someone stealing a computer that contains vital data. The cause could also be non-physical such as a virus attack. In these tutorial series, we will define a threat as a potential attack from a hacker that can allow them to gain unauthorized access to a computer system.

What are Physical Threats?

A physical threat is a potential cause of an incident that may result in loss or physical damage to the computer systems.

The following list classifies the physical threats into three (3) main categories;

◉ Internal: The threats include fire, unstable power supply, humidity in the rooms housing the hardware, etc.

◉ External: These threats include Lightning, floods, earthquakes, etc.

◉ Human: These threats include theft, vandalism of the infrastructure and/or hardware, disruption, accidental or intentional errors.

To protect computer systems from the above mentioned physical threats, an organization must have physical security control measures.

The following list shows some of the possible measures that can be taken:

◉ Internal: Fire threats could be prevented by the use of automatic fire detectors and extinguishers that do not use water to put out a fire. The unstable power supply can be prevented by the use of voltage controllers. An air conditioner can be used to control the humidity in the computer room.

◉ External: Lightning protection systems can be used to protect computer systems against such attacks. Lightning protection systems are not 100% perfect, but to a certain extent, they reduce the chances of Lightning causing damage. Housing computer systems in high lands are one of the possible ways of protecting systems against floods.

◉ Humans: Threats such as theft can be prevented by use of locked doors and restricted access to computer rooms.

What are Non-physical Threats?

A non-physical threat is a potential cause of an incident that may result in;

◉ Loss or corruption of system data

◉ Disrupt business operations that rely on computer systems

◉ Loss of sensitive information

◉ Illegal monitoring of activities on computer systems

◉ Cyber Security Breaches

◉ Others

The non-physical threats are also known as logical threats. The following list is the common types of non-physical threats;

◉ Virus

◉ Trojans

◉ Worms

◉ Spyware

◉ Key loggers

◉ Adware

◉ Denial of Service Attacks

◉ Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

◉ Unauthorized access to computer systems resources such as data

◉ Phishing

◉ Other Computer Security Risks

To protect computer systems from the above-mentioned threats, an organization must have logical security measures in place. The following list shows some of the possible measures that can be taken to protect cyber security threats

To protect against viruses, Trojans, worms, etc. an organization can use anti-virus software. In additional to the anti-virus software, an organization can also have control measures on the usage of external storage devices and visiting the website that is most likely to download unauthorized programs onto the user’s computer.

Unauthorized access to computer system resources can be prevented by the use of authentication methods. The authentication methods can be, in the form of user ids and strong passwords, smart cards or biometric, etc.

Intrusion-detection/prevention systems can be used to protect against denial of service attacks.There are other measures too that can be put in place to avoid denial of service attacks.

Source: guru99.com

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Cyber Threat Scores – What you need to know

Yesterday’s defenses cannot be compared to today’s threats. The ongoing battle of ever-rising cyberattacks has required that defenders innovate new methods in order to remain ahead of advanced cyber threats. Looking forward, these new threats require actionable threat intelligence coupled with a threat score before they damage the infrastructure.

Threat intelligence provides data to security professionals to help them with prompt decisions on cyber defense strategy.

The first step to creating a threat score is to analyze the effect of cyber threats over business risks to determine the most effective cyber threat intelligence management plan.

◉ What threats are impacting your specific business region?
◉ Are your supply chain partners secure?
◉ To what extent are the supply chain partners granted access to your networks?
◉ What type of malicious activity does your first-line security team observe on the network?
◉ Did your security team record malicious activity on the adjacent networks too?

From Threat Score to Risk Assessment

The cyberthreat intelligence process provides threat severity scores and these scores assess the impact of each threat. Even though these threat scores convey insufficient information about each threat’s probability, they can be compared with each other to begin to get a clear picture of the threat landscape. We need the probability and severity information of potential threats to assess the risks to the organization. The threat score helps you tune your security to challenge or block the attacks based on their severity.

Threat intelligence feeds report potential network threats, including those already within an organization’s firewalls, and their probability of causing harm. However, solely relying on threat feeds to assess threat possibilities is not enough because there is so much to know about threats that can’t be adequately summarized by threat feeds.

6 Factors influencing the risk of cyber threats

The various factors that influence the probability and risk of encountering various threats are as follows –

1. Cyber supply chain

It’s not enough to just security an organization’s network assets. According to Symantec, supply chain attacks were up by 78% in 2019, making third-parties with access to your organization’s networks a major area of concern. Any access given to partners, consultants, or other contractors should be scrutinized heavily and managed thoughtfully. Another way criminals can use your relationships with third parties against you is by taking advantage of their potentially weaker security systems and accessing any of your data they have on their networks that way. Organizations should required supply chain partners follow security practices as stricts as their own before sharing data or network access.

2. Industry

Threats can be industry-specific or impact each industry differently. For example, IoT threats in healthcare are more dangerous than in other industries, point-of-sale malware can cripple retail businesses in ways not seen in other sectors, and threats to the industrial control systems in the infrastructure sector could cause nation-wide outages and mass chaos.

3. Vulnerabilities

Some threats exploit vulnerabilities in segments of the application services, firmware, open ports, etc. of specialized devices. Information gathered from regular vulnerability scans enables the prioritization of threats in accordance with the organization’s network inventory. Of course, any actionable information regarding vulnerabilities requires attention.

4. Network connectivity

Threats can multiply rapidly in the local network framework either by activity patterns or design. Upon activation of these rapidly multiplying threats in autonomous blocks, the risk of the threat spreading across network assets increases significantly. Therefore, being aware of threats in and around the network is essential to protecting them. It is equally important to assess the risks accurately in the ever-evolving topology of the internet.

Understanding the organization’s network segmentation is important too. The location of malicious activity on the network defines the prioritization of response activity. Similarly, it’s important to verify whether the newly discovered malware instance has access to the server or to any crucial databases.

5. Interaction effects

Threats cannot be treated in isolation. They are largely influenced by other factors like network connectivity, vulnerabilities, and location on the network. Interaction can be the most difficult part of implementing an organization’s cyber risk assessment. At the same time, understanding how threats on different segments of the network can affect the network as a whole is an essential part of any security program.

6. Value

While performing cyber risk assessments, it is important to consider the different values of the assets you are protecting. The value an adversary places on a piece of information could be different from how the organization sees the asset. The internal value assessment, or how the organization sees the asset, influences the impact of a data attack and calls for cybersecurity action. The external value assessment, or how a criminal sees the asset, affects the probability of a targeted cyberattack.

Organizations need automated risk assessment capabilities that perform in tandem with threat severity scores. Information from threat intelligence enables cybersecurity professionals to understand and follow the dynamic threat landscape. However, the integration of contextual data is crucial for cybersecurity management to assess the probability associated with each threat as it pertains to their specific organization.

Source: eccouncil.org

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5 Reasons Why Your Threat Intelligence Strategy Will Fail and How You Can Salvage It

A well-established cybersecurity team is equipped with the latest tools, valuable experience of infosec professionals, a dedicated budget, and plenty of data from threat intelligence sources. Is this not enough for a team to give excellent performance and stay untouched by emerging threats? Perhaps not if you are doing it wrong.

In a study performed by PwC (Price Waterhouse Coopers), of 10,000 global CSOs and CIOs, only 51% monitor and analyze threat intelligence for detecting incidents and risks.

Why Threat Intelligence Can Fail

1. Misunderstanding business value

It is significant to understand what type of threat intelligence is required for your business. Threat intelligence data is identified based on business problems. An analyst collects the data if a particular threat feed serves as a problem-solving tool and not because the data is interesting, and the chart looks cool. If the intelligence is not connected to the business problems, the purpose of having a threat intelligence team will not be met.

How to fix it:

Always analyze the data from the threat intelligence perspective and its ability to protect your business. Understand if it can help in finding direct threats to your organization and can correlate internal data with external sources. The correlation should able to create more effective security policies and prioritize vulnerabilities to reduce business risks.

2. The wrong feed

There are many feeds available on threat intelligence and if the feed that you own is not relevant to your business, it is of no value. When your business is operating from a challenging environment, then your business requirements are different than those of other companies working from a safer place. For example, if your business is healthcare and you are based in an environmentally challenging environment, then your business is exposed to threats that are different to that of other healthcare operating from developed towns and cities.

Consider the source of data, whether it is raw or processed, drawn from public or private sources. Find out what your requirement is and ensure that you minimize redundancy. The same threat on different feeds doesn’t make it important.

Getting overwhelmed with the information is equally worse to having too little. Be focused on the information relevant to your business.

How to fix it:

Simply having feeds are not enough for having a successful threat intelligence program. There should be context present in the threats that allow you to do security decisions quickly without drowning data. Understand that every threat does not address risks directly but ensure that the threat of intelligence is relevant to your business.

3. Wrong focus on the feeds

Do you focus on the feeds or the entire data as a whole? The entire collection of data includes the internal data of threat, attack, etc., feed data, and data related to event monitoring, traffic, rules, etc. Do you have enough metadata or are you missing on the valuable data about a real threat? Do you able to establish the connection? This is understandable that getting intelligence regularly is a critical task. But it is not possible to analyze the data on a weekly basis or expecting automation of the process serves no purpose.

How to fix it:

To fix the wrong focus of threat intelligence, move from collection to analyzing. But analyzing the entire data is time-consuming and the burden can be reduced by using the technologies that enable your team to concentrate on data analysis and not simply on data collection. Ultimately, threat intelligence is useful if it can prioritize threats based on the severity of the risks and enables you to focus on it.

4. Drowning the data

The Automation and Orchestration research study conducted by ESG, it was identified that despite investing heavily in information security solutions, nearly 74% of those surveyed reported that security events/alerts are simply ignored because their teams can’t keep up with the suffocating volume. The causes include feeds intended for wrong industries or inappropriately sized security teams. Hence, it is important to figure out what the requirement, whether raw data on threats or actionable intelligence which can help on finetuning firewall rules.

How to fix it:

Understand that the feeds are data and not real intelligence. If the feeds are bringing fatigue efforts should be made in tying the feeds with the business needs to make a faster security decision. If the data from the feed is not used, then it is not needed.

5. Inability to operationalize the data

In a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute on IT leaders, it was observed that 65% believe that threat intelligence could have prevented from an attack to their organization. However, 66% are not satisfied with their current approaches to threat intelligence and felt that the information is not timely. 46% analyzed that the information is not well categorized according to threat trap and it needs to be improved.

Threat intelligence does not trigger a response to a breach but can help in developing tactical actions, provided the team knows how to drive the required action. For an effective threat intelligence, tools and feeds alone not enough and it should be aligned with the business requirements.

How to fix it:

Threat intelligence plays an important role with numerous teams while working to prevent, detect, respond and predict the latest known and unknown threats. it requires continuous monitoring and analysis and strategic to process the valuable feed throughout each phase.

Source: eccouncil.org

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