When there’s data, there are vulnerabilities. And when there are especially glaring vulnerabilities, there are breaches.  73% of successful breaches in the corporate sector are carried out by penetrating web applications through their vulnerabilities. What ensues thereafter is borderline horrific: business operations come to a standstill, customer confidence eroded, and loss of revenue.

Cybercrime is on the rise because of two main contributing factors: the attackers are getting smarter, and corporations continue to be ill-prepared. The Ponemon Institute claims that 1 in 5 companies do not test their software for security vulnerabilities, and 40% of companies do not have sufficient cybersecurity. That’s pretty much a recipe for disaster.

Certainly, there are various safeguards and processes corporations undertake to deal with their security vulnerabilities. And for the longest time, vulnerability assessments (VA) and penetration testing (PT) operated in their silos. VAs were incorporated by standard organizations with a good amount of digital data, while PTs were suited for companies with complex applications and lots of lucrative, sensitive data.

Yet somewhere down the line, as the cybersecurity environment became more heightened, widespread and vulnerable, it made sense for the two procedures to join forces to give organizations a more balanced security posture. Aptly, rather than coining some fancy name for this union, common sense prevailed and we simply called this process Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing (VAPT).

To comprehend what the two processes provide together, it is important to understand what each of them are, what distinguishes one from the other and what makes them such a potent combination when mixed together. 

What is Vulnerability Assessment

A vulnerability assessment is an information security process used to identify weaknesses or vulnerabilities in your IT systems and networks. They can be performed either manually or automatically, and are usually conducted in the following steps:

Step 1: Vulnerability Identification

This is where analysts test the security health of applications and servers by either scanning them with automated tools or testing them manually. The result of this exercise will be a comprehensive list of an organization’s vulnerabilities.

Step 2: Vulnerability Analysis

Once the vulnerabilities are identified and listed, we go about the process of identifying the source and root cause. This helps in coming up with the requisite solution, i.e. if the vulnerability is an old version of your open source library, the remedy is to upgrade the library.

Step 3: Risk Assessment

This involves prioritizing the vulnerabilities and assigning a rank to each of them based on factors like which systems are affected, what data and which functions are at risk, ease & severity of attacks and potential damage.

Step 4: Remediation

This is the process of closing the security gaps caused by the vulnerabilities, by introducing new security procedures, measures or tools.

You can choose to go with a holistic vulnerability assessment of your entire system, or break it down into subparts like host assessment, database assessment, network & wireless assessment and application scans. It is advisable to conduct the latter two assessments at the very least, because apps (35%) and networks (21%) are the most vulnerable points for a security breach.

What is Penetration Testing?

Now, let’s get to penetration testing. This is an authorized, simulated attack on a computer system to evaluate the system’s security and identify weaknesses before the attackers do. Pen tests are usually conducted by ethical hackers with little-to-no prior knowledge of how the system is secured. This level of detachment gives them the ability to expose blind spots missed by the developers who built the system. 

There are multiple types of pen tests based on how deep the company really wants to go down this particular rabbit hole. Open-box tests give the hacker info ahead of time, whereas closed-box tests don’t. Covert pen tests occur when no one in the company is aware of it, whereas internal pen tests are done inside the network to determine how much damage a hostile employee can cause.

These tests usually start with the hired attacker doing sufficient recon work into the business, before unleashing a barrage of techniques to breach their network, including but not limited to brute-force attacks, SQL injections and social engineering. Finally, they cover their tracks and send a detailed report to the organizational top brass displaying their findings.

What Distinguishes One from the Other

At a conceptual level, VAs are focused on detecting & categorizing vulnerabilities, while PTs are focused on exploiting them to draw insights. PTs always involve manual intervention (in the form of the ethical hacker’s efforts), whereas VAs can be either manual or automatic. This makes VAs less watertight when it comes to detecting errors, while comprehensive PTs help find business logic errors that automated tools simply cannot. It is impossible to achieve zero false positives with the automation of VAs, while the manual component of PTs makes it very much possible.

All this makes VAs less time consuming and expensive than PTs, simply because the latter is exhaustive and more beneficial to your company’s security posture. VAs can take a few hours to complete because of its automation, whereas PTs take a few weeks to complete.

What Makes Them Such A Potent Combination

For starters, their approaches complement each other. VAs incorporate an inside-out approach – PTs look from the outside-in. VAs are an organization’s inherent analysis of its flaws, while PTs involve an external actor looking at an organization’s security with a fresh, unbiased pair of eyes.

Combining both together brings the best of automated tools and human expertise, working together to form improved organizational security. A comprehensive VAPT can cover all aspects of your IT – networks, apps, remote devices, APIs and even the cloud, where most businesses are gravitating towards.

The best remedies are preventive rather than curative, and VAPTs help identify your weaknesses before others exploit them. Uncovering vulnerabilities, avoiding breaches, protecting customer data, maintaining reputation, achieving compliance and generating detailed reports are just some of the benefits this process provides.

But the key to VAPT’s efficacy is to keep doing them at regular intervals because cybersecurity is at a stage where it’s tectonically shifting by the day. Taking this into consideration along with budget constraints, it is advisable to conduct a VAPT every 6 months.

So, when was the last time you conducted one? If the answer is hovering near or even surpassing a year, we recommend you get one as soon as possible. To that end, iValue provides a host of services for VAPT, so click here to start discovering and fixing all the vulnerabilities in your system!