What is vulnerability scanning?
Vulnerability scanning is the process of detecting and evaluating security flaws in IT systems, networks, and software before attackers can exploit them. It involves using vulnerability scanners, which are automated tools that continuously search systems for known security vulnerabilities, including missing security updates, misconfigurations, and exposed secrets. They’re also usually purpose-based: they can have network-based, host-suited, or database-suited specializations.
This practice cuts across all verticals of an organization’s IT ecosystem, including the following:
Networks
Endpoints
APIs
Dependencies
In-house and third-party apps
Vulnerability scans identify weaknesses across your systems and networks. Depending on your organization’s specific security needs, you might scan individual systems for vulnerabilities or expand to include entire network infrastructures.
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Vulnerability scanning vs. penetration testing: What’s the difference?
While vulnerability scanning quickly identifies potential security weaknesses in systems, penetration testing is a more comprehensive, manual approach. It simulates real-world attacks to exploit cloud vulnerabilities and assess an organization’s overall security posture.
Here’s a bird’s-eye view of the differences:
| Action | Outcome | Input | Time | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vulnerability scanning | A list of potential vulnerabilities | Automated |
| Daily |
| Penetration testing | Results of a real-world simulated cyberattack | Manual |
| Once per year |
Why vulnerability scanning is important for security
Vulnerability scanning is essential for organizations because it proactively identifies and mitigates security weaknesses, prevents potential breaches, and reduces associated costs. It also ensures compliance with security frameworks and provides valuable insights into digital assets’ security posture for more efficient resource allocation.
Below are five of the top benefits:
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| More proactive security | Vulnerability scanning allows organizations to identify and address security weaknesses before attackers can exploit them. This proactive approach prevents potential security breaches and reduces the risk of data loss, financial damage, and reputational harm. |
| Increased regulatory compliance | Vulnerability scanning helps organizations achieve data and software security to better align with compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST 800-53. |
| Greater cost savings | Identifying and remedying vulnerabilities early can significantly reduce the costs of a security breach, which often extend beyond immediate remediation efforts to include legal fees, fines, and lost business. Regular scanning also helps organizations allocate resources more efficiently by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their severity. |
| More effective asset visibility and management | Vulnerability scanning provides an inventory of all devices and software on a network and offers valuable insights into an organization’s digital asset security posture. This visibility is crucial for effective asset management to ensure that all parts of the IT infrastructure are up-to-date and secure. |
| Improved security posture | Regular scanning enables organizations to continuously assess and improve their security posture. By identifying and tracking vulnerabilities over time, organizations can measure their security strategies’ effectiveness and make informed decisions about where to invest in security improvements. |
Resources like Wiz’s Vulnerability Database help you achieve these benefits by alerting you to the latest vulnerabilities so you can proactively address the ones that pose the highest risk for your organization. With 136,000 vulnerabilities and counting in the database, you’ll get a more complete view of weak spots that attackers could exploit versus trying to keep up with the latest ones via a more manual method.
Types of vulnerability scanning and common use cases
Vulnerability scanning includes both active and passive techniques:
Active scanning, or non-credentialed scanning, involves sending simulated attacks, queries, or requests to the target to identify potential vulnerabilities (like buffer overflows, unencrypted data, and broken authentication processes).
Passive scanning, on the other hand, involves unobtrusively analyzing network traffic (without actively probing) to detect vulnerabilities that attackers can leverage to spread malware or steal or manipulate data.
There are also different use cases for vulnerability scanning. These are the most common ones:
Network vulnerability scanning: Scans the network for vulnerabilities, including open ports, unpatched software, and weak network protocols
Web application vulnerability scanning: Looks for security flaws like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other vulnerabilities that are unique to web applications
Database vulnerability scanning: Concentrates on identifying vulnerabilities within databases, such as misconfigurations, weak authentication, and overly permissive permissions
Host vulnerability scanning: Scans individual hosts (servers or workstations) to identify vulnerabilities at the operating system level or within installed software
Container and virtualized environment scanning: Identifies vulnerabilities in containerized applications and virtual environments by scanning container images and managing containers and virtual machines
How does vulnerability scanning work?
The vulnerability scanning process involves the following eight steps:
Here’s a simple breakdown of each step:
1. Scoping
Before scanning, locate the target networks and applications, map out endpoints, and identify dependencies. Scoping also involves determining if you need to scan internal devices, external-facing systems, or a combination of both.
2. Tool selection
Choose a solution from the pool of available commercial and open-source tools that aligns with your organization’s security requirements. The solution you choose should have a user-friendly console for easy vulnerability scanning and should function optimally across distributed, hybrid networks to ease risk identification across all your environments.
Agentless scanning solutions typically have quicker setup and deployment and require less maintenance since they can scan all workloads using cloud native APIs and connect to customer environments with a single org-level connector. If the approach is agent-based, this type of deployment will require ongoing agent installation, update, and maintenance effort.
3. Configuration
Configure your scanning tool according to your desired parameters. Configuration details may include specifying target IP addresses or domain names, setting scanning intensity or speed, and defining scanning techniques.
You should never resort to using default policy configurations, though, since they’ll rarely address your organization’s nuanced business-, region-, and industry-specific requirements.
4. Scan initiation
Initiate the process via commands or by using the options within your tool of choice, such as a GUI. Some resources will allow you to schedule your scans, which makes this step automatic once you select your preferences.
5. Vulnerability detection
Scanners may compare the system’s attack surface to parameters in the vulnerability database it uses and then probe for common vulnerability types. It’s important to get information upfront about a scanner’s capabilities, though, so you know whether it will meet your needs. This is because some specialize in detecting only specific types—database and network vulnerabilities, for example.
6. Vulnerability analysis
After scanning, a tool like Wiz will generate a comprehensive list of identified vulnerabilities, order them based on severity, filter out false positives, and provide options for remediation.
7. Remediation and rescanning
Based on the scan results, your security team can resolve identified vulnerabilities by deploying security patches, updating software versions, or reconfiguring security settings, depending on recommendations in the vulnerability report.
After remediation, always rescan the target systems to verify that your fixes effectively patched the vulnerabilities.
8. Continuous monitoring
New vulnerabilities will continue to crop up—it’s inevitable. But if you develop a strong vulnerability management program that automates scanning at regular intervals, you’ll be able to identify and address emerging threats promptly.
What vulnerabilities does a scan uncover?
These are common areas of weakness that a vulnerability scan typically identifies:
Network: Open ports, weak passwords, misconfigured firewalls, and unauthorized devices or connections
System: Missing patches, outdated software, misconfigurations, and vulnerable operating systems
Applications: Security flaws, XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities, and misconfigured settings
Cloud-specific: Misconfigured cloud services and settings and improper identity access and authentication
The specific vulnerabilities your scanner finds will depend on the type of scan it performs (like network, application, or database) and whether it’s an internal or external scan. But ideally, you’d use a tool that can spot all four of the vulnerabilities above.
Wiz, for example, caught a vulnerability in Ingress NGINX with system, network, and cloud-specific implications—not to mention an application-specific Ivanti EPMM RCE vulnerability. These are just two examples out of thousands.
Vulnerability scanning databases
Vulnerability scanners use a database of known vulnerabilities to identify weaknesses. These databases include the National Vulnerability Database and CVE.org, which contain information like vulnerability severity, potential impact, and recommended mitigation techniques.
Another one is Wiz’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Database, a CVE Numbering Authority that lets you filter by technology, recency, whether there’s been an exploit in the last 60 days, or how high-profile the vulnerability is. As a result, you can quickly drill down to the vulnerabilities that are worth paying attention to.
Scanners then compare discoveries in the target environment and match them with those in the database, after which they flag and provide remediation options for any vulnerabilities they identify.
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Wiz's CVE Database curates CVE data to create easy-to-navigate profiles that cover the entire vulnerability timeline, exploit scenarios, and mitigation steps.
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Common vulnerability scanning challenges
A vulnerability scan may be ineffective if the following issues are present:
| Challenge | Description |
|---|---|
| Resource sharing | Vulnerability scanning requires significant network bandwidth and computing resources. Production (in the IT environment) is also resource-intensive. When both processes share resources from the organization’s infrastructure, resource contention occurs, which can negatively impact the scan’s efficiency. |
| False positives | The vulnerability scanning tool could incorrectly identify a non-existent vulnerability, which wastes time and effort. For instance, while a developer is patching a dependency in the source code, the tool might alert that malicious activity is taking place. Misconfigurations usually lead to these kinds of false positives. |
| Alert fatigue | Vulnerability scanning often generates thousands of alerts, which makes tracking and addressing each alert overwhelming for your security team. This can lead to neglecting critical vulnerabilities. |
| Siloed tooling | Using vulnerability scanning tools with other security solutions across different environments or departments can create data silos and distort vulnerability management. This can hinder collaboration and make it difficult to have an end-to-end view of the organization’s security posture. |
| Inability to contextualize vulnerability impact | Vulnerability scanning tools may be ineffective for risk management since they’re often ignorant of asset criticality, business processes, and system dependencies. They also likely won’t understand the impact of vulnerabilities across individual organizations. |
| High ownership costs | Vulnerability scanning tools and their associated infrastructure can be expensive to procure, deploy, and maintain. Organizations may also need to invest in staff training and dedicated personnel, which increases costs. |
| Ongoing maintenance efforts | Some vulnerability scanning solutions require installing agents on target systems for continuous scanning. Additionally, managing these agents’ installation, updates, and maintenance across multiple systems can be challenging and time-consuming. |
| Blind spots | Tools sometimes fail to detect vulnerabilities within specific asset types, such as cloud infrastructure, mobile devices, or IoT devices. |
| Software development delays | Traditional vulnerability scanning practices require extensive scans and manual verification, which can delay application development and software update release. These delays ultimately hurt an organization’s bottom line. |
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Key features to look for in a vulnerability scanning tool
To effectively address and mitigate the above challenges, choose a vulnerability scanning tool with the following eight key features:
1. Continuous scanning capabilities
Continuous monitoring is the last but most crucial stage of vulnerability scanning. Choosing a tool that can continuously scan and detect vulnerabilities as they emerge helps your organization remain consistently vulnerability-free.
The fact that we add over 1,000 new vulnerabilities to the Wiz CVE database monthly speaks to how quickly new ones can pop up. Because of this, you need a fast, reliable way to spot vulnerabilities within your cloud environment so you can resolve them just as quickly.
2. Agentless approach
Your vulnerability scanning tool should be agentless, which eliminates the need to install and manage scanning agents on target systems. Such tools use network-based scanning techniques, consume fewer resources, and erase the possibilities of incompatibility.
It’s important to be able to scan virtual machines or containers, even if the workload is offline. Security teams can then remediate vulnerabilities before the workload is online and effectively at risk.
But since an agent is part of the workload’s runtime, agent-based scanning can only happen while the workload is online. This also applies to authenticated scanning, which means you can test applications in their ready-to-run configuration, both in staging and production environments.
3. Risk-based prioritization
Choose a tool that provides risk-based vulnerability prioritization. It should consider not just factors like severity, exploitability, and asset criticality but also the following:
External exposure
Secrets
Misconfigurations
Malware presence
Wiz, for example, considers all of the above. As a result, it can correlate vulnerabilities that have numerous risk factors to mitigate the amount of alert fatigue you experience.
4. Cross-cloud and cross-technology support
Environments are becoming more hybridized and distributed. This added complexity means that you need a technology-agnostic tool to ensure software compatibility. Your scanner of choice should be able to scan different storage environments and cloud providers, including AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, and Alibaba Cloud, regardless of underlying OS or programming language.
This type of cloud vulnerability management is critical since it can keep up with the speed and scale of the cloud in a way that traditional vulnerability management solutions can’t.
For example, while traditional scanning tools can identify and remediate vulnerabilities, they often flag non-critical and irrelevant ones. This leads to alert fatigue and means that you put time and resources toward low priority action items. Furthermore, traditional vulnerability management often lacks necessary context.
5. Scanning before deployment
Opt for a tool that can scan virtual machines and containers and detect potential vulnerabilities in them before deployment. This will help you avoid spreading vulnerabilities across the entire production environment and will minimize the risk of security breaches, data compromise, and service disruptions.
By implementing these checks as early as possible in the CI/CD pipeline, you’ll not only build a more secure production environment but will also reinforce the DevSecOps mindset within your organization.
6. Comprehensive workload coverage
Can the tool you’re considering scan both a Linux server and an SQL database, as well as web apps and containerized microservices? If not, consider this a red flag.
Your scanning tool needs to be able to simultaneously scan various systems and workloads—servers, endpoints, databases, and web applications—to allow for proactive, efficient vulnerability remediation. After all, your vulnerability management process shouldn’t leave any IT assets out, regardless of their function or environment.
7. Data-based visualization reports
Visual representations of vulnerability data in various formats—such as tables, graphs, and charts—are key to decision-making and remediation. They make it easier to spot trends, identify critical vulnerabilities, and see the overall security posture of the scanned environment.
Visual representations are also helpful for communicating vulnerability data clearly, both to technical audiences and non-technical stakeholders.
8. Integration
The tool you choose must seamlessly integrate with those that handle security information and event management, log management, and security configuration management. This enables better threat detection and incident response and provides cohesive security management.
Go beyond vulnerability scanning with vulnerability management
Wiz performs agentless vulnerability scanning across cloud environments based on multiple updated vulnerability databases and public sources to ensure accurate, up-to-date vulnerability detection. The platform’s scans analyze a variety of metadata—including installed packages, programming language libraries, operating system information, and file hashes—to identify vulnerabilities.
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Additionally, it scans both cloud resources and code repositories without requiring elevated privileges and prioritizes vulnerabilities based on contextual risk factors like external exposure and cloud entitlements.
With our old platform, we were getting thousands of alerts for every one problem that we’d solve. Wiz allows us to understand vulnerabilities much more efficiently. Now, we can concentrate our efforts on problems rather than simply identifying them.
Alex Steinleitner, President & CEO, Artisan
Curious about how vulnerable your cloud currently is? Schedule your free vulnerability scan today. We’ll not only flag which vulnerabilities within your cloud are exploitable, but more importantly, we’ll also tell you exactly what to do to resolve the issues fast.
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