Almost all critical infrastructures of the world today face a new threat in the form of cyberattacks. Brute force, malware, and DDoS attack are the most prevalent threats looming in cyberspace. However, these are not all, and there are other types of vulnerabilities you need to be aware of. In the hostile IT space, even the US government is vulnerable.

Research shows that government organizations suffered from billions of dollars worth of losses due to ransomware attacks. These losses came in the form of downtime costs and recovery costs. Downtime costs refer to the amount of revenue an organization loses during the time it stays non-operational. Meanwhile, recovery costs refer to costs of getting operations to function again after you have dealt with the damages.

Attacks on critical applications of the nation are spiraling after current geopolitical downturns. These attacks are very concerning because they tend to expose some of the loopholes in the IT infrastructure. Attacks of such stature only expose vulnerabilities of other private organizations as well.

What is Vulnerability in IT?

Vulnerability is ultimately defined as the lack of comprehensive security controls or weaknesses. These controls exist in different stages and layers of IT. Business rivals can exploit these differences to conduct attacks and threats. Weaknesses and vulnerabilities can exist at any layer of security, whether it is identity, endpoints, or network.

To understand IT vulnerability, think of a scenario where you have three applications, and the first two applications are prompting a user to perform second-factor authentication, but the third application is not asking the user to perform multi-factor authentication. In this instance, there is a clear weakness or vulnerability that exists in the system interface.

In this instance, there is a weakness or vulnerability that exists in this object. Or the vulnerability is specific to the user object according to your configuration. A hacker will try to access your system through the compromised route, one without multi-factor authentication, making it possible for them to access your confidential data.

How Vulnerable is your IT?

To find out whether your IT system is truly vulnerable, you have to conduct a vulnerability assessment. Organizations need to make sure that everything runs smoothly to generate revenue without falling into loopholes and traps. For this, it’s imperative that organizations understand their weaknesses before they can move forward with business procedures.

Once they identify their weaknesses, they can quickly address them before they result in harmful impacts and drastic losses. Vulnerability assessments unveil vulnerabilities in your system, detailing their intensity and level, along with the loopholes that you need to address. By getting into the mind of the offender, assessments can limit all risks of attacks and damages.

Carrying out this assessment requires a company to utilize particular tools available. These tools help scan networks and interfaces on an enterprise network. Once they connect to your network, you allow them to perform a thorough system scan. They will start probing your assets using TCP UDP and ICMP queries, other mechanisms, and scripts.

They also gather responses from software, hardware, and other networking stacks. In a nutshell, tools of such caliber can find out about everything from OS version details to applications that are operating as backdoors. It also tells you about the ports that are susceptible to allowing threats inside the system.

Once an assessment and scan are complete, companies can move towards addressing them and getting them fixed. These tools often allow you to create different types of reports based on the scanning and audience.

Network Vulnerability

Network vulnerability is the most complex to resolve. Any random port open on any of your network devices or appliances may result in vulnerability. Moreover, attackers can use the weakest link in your enterprise to compromise a system. It is also important to know that attackers have a particular timeline.

They have certain investments that they make when formulating an attack. This investment can also involve exploiting your system. This means they will try to compromise existing vulnerabilities. They will try to take advantage of vulnerabilities that exist within the system, for which they have to follow a typical discovery model. This model requires them to use certain tools to identify their weaknesses in a matter of seconds.

This is why it is very important for you to pay attention to managing vulnerabilities and how they work for your enterprise. Your enterprise may have IoT devices and operational technology networks, and other components that monitor and report information to cloud servers. This may require you to think about common use-cases and vulnerabilities within IoT devices.

Security Management

Vulnerability assessment and IT management are very important for IT architecture and organization. You should be able to perform vulnerability management across your organization. This can include both IT and OT or any digital state or entity that falls under this category. If there are vulnerabilities in your enterprise that will disrupt operations, then assessment, management, and maintenance are the way to go forward.

Access security and Vulnerability Assessment Today

The best vulnerability and security assessment is one that gets inside the malicious mind of a hacker. When assessing a network interface with a relentless desire to harm, one can find loopholes and inadequacies that have remained unrealized. Prescient Solutions takes this approach when they are assessing vulnerabilities for their clients so that they can protect the integrity of their data. Prescient’s PVSA helps initiate the assessment and scanning phases using the same processes of automated tools and manual processes. Request an assessment today by filling out the online form and get a hold of superior assessment strategies.