The Difference between Vulnerability Assessment and Pentesting

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Introduction

In this article, we will explain the difference between Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration testing.

Cyber-crime shows no signs of slowing down, and cyber-attacks being on the rise have the potential to incapacitate an organization. There are various ways that you can choose to evaluate how your company would react in case of a Cyber Attack.

So what is a Vulnerability Assessment?

Vulnerability Assessment is designed to identify vulnerabilities in your system with an assessment that recognizes and manually verifies weaknesses, without actually exploiting them.

It relies on automated scans, using strategic custom setups, but relies on less manual input without any attempts of exploitation in the process. It’s more of a Proof of Concept of attacks, that the blue team needs guidance to work on a strategy in order to solve the issues found.

What can you achieve by performing a Vulnerability Assessment?

The goal is to receive reports that are generated by specific tools and frameworks in a very organized way that includes all remediations and recommendations. They are sorted by rank, and CVSS Score to create awareness with your defenders and quick visibility of your infrastructure from the outside world.

The purpose is to evaluate how your system will work under pressure and its effectiveness when being attacked to understand its limits. Preparation is key so that you have a good plan for when such attacks happen, by actually evaluating them and minimizing your overall downtime.

This is why applying patches to fix these security vulnerabilities is essential: if you don’t update your software, firmware, and operating systems to the latest versions as they are released, the vulnerabilities in your systems will remain exploitable, leaving your organization exposed.

So what is Penetration Testing?

Penetration Testing is designed to determine whether an attacker can achieve specific goals when facing your current security postures, such as stealing sensitive data or other activities that would harm the organization. It involves critical thinking simulating manual attacks going through post-exploitation which means it’s more than just gaining access, but going beyond.

Unlike Automated Scans which can find based on generic handling of identifying targets getting up to 15% of the complicated vulnerabilities. The purpose is to manually rely on simulating different and custom attacks, that go through phases to bypass, attack, exfiltrate data, find vulnerabilities and exploit them manually to show the impact.

What can you achieve by performing Penetration Testing?

• Visibility

You cannot protect what you cannot see. Visibility on your network is a very important aspect.

It’s one thing to run a scan and say “you are vulnerable to a missing security certificate” and it’s a different thing to exploit the vulnerability to discover the depth of the problem and find out exactly what type of information could be revealed if exploited.

• Impact

Discover the Impact of the vulnerability so that your team can understand what sort of risk levels vs business needs they need to work on.

• Uncover critical vulnerabilities in your environment
• Prioritize and tackle risks based on their exploitability and impact
• Meet compliance with industry standards and regulations
• Keep executive management informed about your organization’s risk level
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your infrastructure as you are being attacked in real-time

This will bring new visibility that would lead to revealing hints requiring real human and manual intervention, to reach a stage of compromising the network, when it reaches the attack phase.

Visibility Enables Control.

Penetration Testing is a crucial way of discovering how security researchers see your network from the outside and this is what makes the difference. After this assessment is done and our recommendations, you’ll be able to make smart security decisions that will protect your data and keep your company and employees one step ahead of criminal hackers.

Which one is best for your Company?

Depending on your budget, on what sort of hardware and software mechanisms you have invested in your infrastructure, no matter what you have configured if you do not put them into a test you will not understand how they can stand up in real attacks when someone wants to penetrate your network.

Whether you are looking for a quick scan which means you can go with Vulnerability Assessment types, and also depending on if you have the team that will be working on the remediation or you want to assess if actually, an attacker can not just get access to your network, but what sort of damage can they do not in theory but in action, such as exploiting the vulnerabilities and going deeper into your internal network to show the outcome.

These solutions are needed for all types of clients, whether you are a startup or a more established company with more branches. Even before you launch a product online its a website, an ERP, anything that has public access, or after a major change in your hardware or software, seeking these types of services is demanded in the EU due to the GDPR, if its compliance you are after such as ISO 27001 or PCI, or you want to test your company’s defense mechanisms to see how it can withstand should you become a victim of a Cyber Attack.

In any testing (Security, Quality, Functionality, etc.), you need an external-different point of view to be able to perform the testing thoroughly and in a proper, unbiased way.

To find out more about how Black Hat Ethical Hacking can help you, check out our Solutions

https://www.blackhatethicalhacking.com/solutions