Why detecting vulnerabilities at an early stage is important?

Cyber threats are becoming an ever growing problem for many institutions, with hackers often targeting large companies that have customer sensitive information to break into. Just recently, the personal information of approximately 5400 past and present clients of AXA insurance in Singapore have been compromised in a cyber attack, while Equifax recently announced that attackers compromised 143 million of its US based customer’s personal information.

To prevent such attacks, it is always recommended that companies perform regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. Vulnerability assessment is a process that defines, identifies, and classifies the security holes in a computer or network infrastructure. There are many open source vulnerability assessment tools on the Internet, but their ability to provide accurate reports often leaves a lot to be desired. Penetration testing is an approach of testing a computer network or web application to find vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit. Penetration testing consists of five stages: information gathering, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, post exploitation, and reporting.

Let’s use an example to get a better understanding. An IT company has an extensive internal network and websites. When vulnerability scanners discover new vulnerabilities, their software developers should fix the security issue as soon as possible. From an app security point of view, the developers of a vulnerable app must work to create the necessary security patches. As such, regular vulnerability scanning is important but challenging.

As mentioned above, continuous vulnerability scanning is difficult to maintain but it can give you tremendous benefits. Early stage detection of vulnerabilities and immediate steps to remedy such vulnerabilities is still the best way to prevent threats from hackers. Drawbacks of regular vulnerability scanning are that they are time-consuming and costly. An alternative to outsourcing the vulnerability scanning services to a cyber security company is to use automated tools to perform the scanning, which are more time efficient and financially viable.

An important consideration when choosing which tool to use is that it must be up to date and look for the latest relevant vulnerabilities. Assessment duration depends on the needs and resources of each organization as well as the number of critical systems it has. Horangi Scanners combined with carefully selected open source tools have identified over 50,000 threat signatures to ensure that all your vulnerabilities are discovered.

Can’t you still decide to buy? Try our products for free first before you make a decision! Check it out at https://horangi.com/