Learning More About Vulnerability Scanning

A recent article published on the G2 Learning Hub was titled “The Top 5 Vulnerability Scanners You Need to Patrol Security Grids,” and while it covered the list of what the author considered to be the top 5, what really caught my attention about the article was the introduction to vulnerability scanning included before the list.

So, even if you’re not interested in learning who the top vendors are, this article is worth a look to see if your understanding of vulnerability scanning is complete and to make sure you’ve covered all the use cases of scanning for your infrastructure.  The article has a complete section on the “types of vulnerability scans”, including “internal”, “external”, “authenticated’, “unauthenticated”, “comprehensive”, and “limited.”

Just seeing the list should be a good reminder that if you’re scanning your applications without authenticated credentials (essentially unauthenticated), you are likely to miss scanning some of the most important parts of your application that while protected by credentials, are still subject to attack with stolen credentials and brute force attacks.

The article also has sections on how vulnerability scanners work, how to perform a vulnerability scan, the types of scans (network, host, application, and wireless), as well as the process to get your scan run, and what to do afterwards.  And finally of course, the article lists what the author considers to be the top 5 vulnerability scanners.

The article is definitely worth a visit if you’ve got any interest in vulnerability scannning.

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If you already have a vulnerability scanning program setup in your organization, K2 Cyber Security can help you get better results and enhance the information you are getting from the testing tools.

K2 can help find additional hidden vulnerabilities in DAST and vulnerability testing and address the issues around the lack of remediation guidance and the inadequate quality of security penetration testing results.  K2 Cyber Security Platform is a great addition for adding visibility into the threats discovered by penetration and security testing tools in pre-production and can also find additional vulnerabilities during testing that testing tools may have missed.  K2 can pinpoint the exact location of the discovered vulnerability in the code.  When a vulnerability is discovered (for example, SQL Injection, XSS or Remote Code Injection), K2 can disclose the exact file name along with the line of code that contains the vulnerability, details that testing tools typically are unable to provide, enabling developers to start the remediation process quickly.

In addition to helping find additional vulnerabilities and speeding up the remediation process, K2 Cyber Security can also provide deterministic runtime application security that detects zero day attacks, along with well-known attacks.  K2 issues alerts based on severity and includes actionable alerts that provide complete visibility to the attacks and the vulnerabilities that the attacks are targeting including the location of the vulnerability within the application, providing details like file name and line of code where the vulnerability exists.

Rather than rely on technologies like signatures, heuristics, fuzzy logic, machine learning or AI, K2 uses a deterministic approach to detect true zero-day attacks, without being limited to detecting attacks based on prior attack knowledge.  Deterministic security uses application execution validation, and verifies the API calls are functioning the way the code intended.  There is no use of any prior knowledge about an attack or the underlying vulnerability, which gives our approach the true ability to detect new zero-day attacks. Our technology has 8 patents granted/pending, and has minimal false alerts.

Get more out of your application security testing and change how you protect your applications, and check out K2’s application workload security solution.

Find out more about K2 today by requesting a demo, or get your free trial.