One of the most common questions a security consultant gets from their clients is why vulnerability scanning isn’t enough.

The question usually highlights a lack of understanding about the true nature of cyber-attacks and that regular vulnerability scanning is not enough to detect advanced threats.

In this blog, we will explain vulnerability scanning, its limitations, and why you need more than a good vulnerability scanner to do your job well.

How Does Vulnerability Scanning Work?

Security is a massive issue for businesses these days. We hear about all the bad things happening to small, medium, and large companies daily. So how can you keep your business secure?

One way to eliminate “the low-hanging fruits” is by using vulnerability scanning software.

However, it’s crucial to understand how it works and in which cases it is not the best choice. Vulnerability scanning is a method to perform network security testing (NST) or web application security testing (WAST). It helps find vulnerabilities, such as missing security patches, missing HTTP headers, or unencrypted sensitive data.

These are all vulnerabilities that are very easy to find with an automated tool. It is imperative to know the limitations of this type of vulnerability checks, though. These tools will not identify privilege escalation issues between user roles or whether users can read someone else’s data since every application is different. The automated tool does not understand the privilege hierarchy that differs from application to application.

How Penetration Testing Outperforms Vulnerability Scanning?

As pointed out above, vulnerability scanning provides a sheer list of known vulnerabilities, often with false-positive results.

Penetration testing is a more effective way to secure your network than automated scanners because it simulates an attack to identify weaknesses in the security of your network or application.

This testing goes beyond and pinpoints specific weak spots in your network, such as privilege escalation issues, authentication issues, and missing access controls. It also gives you feedback on how hackers could exploit these weaknesses in the real world, and every finding is documented with a proof of concept on how to replicate the issue.

Conclusion

Penetration testing and vulnerability scan are often confused because they are similar. Still, penetration testing is geared toward security professionals as a necessary step to prove a company’s security. On the other hand, a vulnerability scan is aimed at end-users, and very often, it can only scratch the surface of the targeted application.

In our everyday programming practice, we need both these security inspections to cover as many bases as possible and stay safe 24/7/365.