Comparing Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing
Vulnerability Assessment
There are many different elements of the vulnerability management process, from source code review to vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. While each of these components is powerful in terms of helping organizations lower risk and protect critical IT and networking assets from attack, penetration testing is arguably the most critical in terms of assessing your organization’s susceptibility to real-world threats.
Source code analysis and other code-level assessment systems must be built into the development process itself, as early in the process as possible, to head off potential vulnerabilities before they find their way into production environments. However, even the most heavily scrutinized systems in the world typically go live with many security flaws, based primarily on the time constraints most often faced by development groups, and the scarcity of secure coding skills available among today’s developers.
Popular vulnerability assessment solutions, such as vulnerability scanners, seek to help organizations garner information regarding potential weaknesses by unearthing every type of weakness they can find, but typically produce such large volumes of data that users of the systems are left with a heavy workload in terms of discerning which vulnerabilities pose tangible risks to their IT and networking assets.
Beyond filtering out the many false positives that scanners tend to include in their results, recent industry surveys have shown that, of the tens of thousands of vulnerabilities typically found by scanners in large enterprise networks and applications, only a small fraction represent critical business exposures.
By comparison, penetration testing offers organizations the most effective manner of rapidly identifying their most serious points of security exposure to help prioritize remediation efforts and limit the need to engage in time-consuming patching and code revisions.
Penetration Testing
Penetration testing allows organizations to proactively assess vulnerabilities using real-world exploits, allowing them to evaluate the potential for their systems to be subverted through hacking and malware schemes in the same manner that attackers employ. In addition to saving time that might otherwise be spent chasing down false positives that do not represent exploitable weaknesses, penetration testing also serves as the most effective manner of determining the efficacy of security point solutions and systems defense mechanisms by actively analyzing whether or not those protections can indeed be circumvented by attacks.
Perhaps most importantly, penetration test results enable IT staff to delineate critical security issues that require immediate attention from those that pose lesser risks to help prioritize remediation work.
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Vulnerability Assessment |
Penetration Testing |
Testing Scope |
Scans for all potential network vulnerabilities. |
Identifies vulnerabilities and determines if they can actually be exploited. |
Vulnerability Relevance |
Categorizes vulnerabilities based on standardized, theoretical information – not customized to the tested network. |
Tests vulnerabilities on specific network resources, enabling prioritization of remediation efforts. |
Usefulness of Test Results |
Provides false positives, identifying vulnerabilities that cannot be exploited. |
Exploits vulnerabilities, identifying only those that pose actual threats to network resources. |
Asset Connection Testing |
Does not address connections between network, endpoint and application components. |
Exploits trust relationships between networks, endpoints, applications and end users to demonstrate actual attack paths. |
Remediation Assistance |
Delivers long lists of vulnerabilities, limiting remediation options to widespread patching or time-consuming code revision. |
Assesses the potential risks of specific vulnerabilities, allowing users to address their most significant risks first and test the effectiveness of security patches. |
Testing of Other Security Investments |
Does not simulate attacks to test IDS, IPS, AV, filtering, behavior monitoring, firewalls or other security technologies and end user policies. |
Launches real-world attacks to determine if other security investments are functioning properly and users are adhering to organizational rules and regulations. |
Security Risk Assessment |
Only identifies missing patches or improper configurations, making it impossible to effectively gauge security risks. |
Safely mimics the actions of a hackers and malware attacks, providing risk evaluations based on tangible network threats. |
