Each technical advance brings wave after wave of security holes. Every new protocol may come with exploitable programming errors. Logic errors, vendor-installed backdoors, and default configurations possess the nuisance value to plague everything from modern operating systems to the simplest print server. Moreover, viruses of past seem much paler and tamer as compared to today’s highly optimized Internet worms. Gartner’s estimate that by 2020, 30% of Global 2000 companies will have been directly compromised by an independent group of cyber activists or cyber criminals, then, baths in the light of sense.
This “sure” fear of unknown rightly cries for the need to build an organizational strategy that addresses all the risk indicators. Network administrators need to be equipped with the necessary tools and knowledge to identify vulnerable systems and resolve their security problems before they can be exploited. That’s where the importance of vulnerability assessment, a risk management process, sneaks in.
" Network administrators need to be equipped with the necessary tools and knowledge to identify vulnerable systems and resolve their security problems before they can be exploited. "
The Meaning of Vulnerability Assessment:
In technical lexicon, the word vulnerability denotes any programming error or misconfiguration that could allow an intruder to gain unauthorized access. It could be anything from a weak password on a router to unpatched programming flaws in exposed network services. In simple words, vulnerability assessment is the process of locating and reporting these vulnerabilities. It creates a possibility for you to detect and resolve security problems before they get exploited by someone with a malicious intent. It undertakes it by identifying, evaluating, estimating, and prioritizing expected vulnerabilities.