Conducting A Vulnerability Assessment: A Step-By-Step Guide For Linux Workloads In The Cloud
Being proactive about protecting your systems, networks, applications and critical data is a cornerstone of a robust, successful security program. Having a vulnerability assessment plan is a way of doing just that—proactively identifying weaknesses within your systems, so you can shore them up before attackers find and take advantage of them.
However, conducting a vulnerability assessment on workloads within a cloud environment is different than doing so in a traditional environment. This article examines those differences; we also outline a vulnerability assessment process to help you create stronger security hygiene for your Linux-based systems operating within the cloud.
What is a vulnerability assessment?
Defined broadly, a vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, analyzing and prioritizing vulnerabilities that exist in the software or system components that are present in your infrastructure. A vulnerability may be any type of weakness or even misconfiguration in the software that allows for exploitation or misuse by a malicious actor. The output of a vulnerability assessment is a set of findings that allow for your teams to know which vulnerabilities should be the focus of your remediation efforts to reduce the risk associated with these vulnerabilities. Generally, a vulnerability assessment is an example of how you can be proactive in your security program to make it harder for an attacker to compromise your systems.
Approaches To Vulnerability Assessments
Vulnerability assessment approaches generally fall into two categories: network scanning or agent-based. (Tweet this!) Either a tool is being used to scan systems remotely over the (Read more...)
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Uptycs Blog authored by Pat Haley. Read the original post at: https://www.uptycs.com/blog/how-to-conduct-a-vulnerability-assessment
