Are you confident that your network is 100% secure? Are there old user accounts with administrative access still active? Have all of your security patches been applied? Even to printers, access points and other IoT devices? Following these practices can be critical for keeping your business running, even in the event of an attack.
It is critical to identify vulnerabilities, risks and threats within your environment before a bad threat actor does. One way to accomplish this is with a vulnerability scan. Vulnerability scanning is an organized approach to the testing, identification, analysis and reporting of potential security issues on a network.
There are five core reasons to conduct an annual vulnerability scan on your network. A scan will allow you to:
1. Gain Insight into your Network and Assets
Vulnerability Assessments must start with an Asset Discovery phase. This information can help you to understand which assets are externally facing and how they are connected to the overall network.
Most vulnerability assessments will also provide insight into any rogue devices that are connecting to your network. These devices, such as mobile devices, USBs, or external hard drives can act as a vulnerability within your network if they are not controlled by the same security protocols as other devices within the system. This is why monitoring for these devices is critical to assuring your security posture.
2. Receive Contextual Information for Incident Response
The key to Incident Response is how quickly the issue can be resolved once it is discovered. In the event of a security incident, having insight from your last vulnerability scan will speed up the process in issue resolution.
3. Discover Device Gaps
There are many items that can easily become unmaintained when trying to keep control of an entire network. Common issues that vulnerability scans can detect are:
- Unused user accounts
- Missing or improperly configured patches and updates
- Unnecessary open ports
- Security of other devices connected to the network, such as printers, fax machines, scanners, etc.
4. Maintain Regulatory Compliance Requirements
For organizations who are subjected to regulatory compliance audits, vulnerability scanning is mandatory. Several regulatory compliance standards such as HIPAA, SOX, PCI, and GLBA require that organizations verify that the information contained within their systems are secure.
5. Act on Vulnerabilities BEFORE They Become Threats
When a vulnerability assessment is conducted, results and findings are placed into a report. This helps you to be able to prioritize and understand the vulnerabilities and provide a logical order in which they should be remediated.
For the Tenth Day of Cybersecurity, Kyber Security gave to me… a complimentary one time vulnerability scan. Reach out to sales@kybersecure.com to redeem.