A vulnerability assessment, also known as a security vulnerability assessment, is a holistic evaluation of vulnerability-related risks within an IT and hybrid environment. For cloud environments, your vulnerability assessment would cover assets like AI workloads, VMs, containers, databases, PaaS services, and data.
There are tens of thousands of vulnerabilities that could be quietly nesting in your cloud environment as you’re reading this. (Here are some recent examples.) That includes misconfigurations, shadow IT, poor access controls, incomplete visibility, insecure APIs, network exposure, and more. Vulnerabilities are everywhere. Scary, right?
The good news is that not all vulnerabilities are equally dangerous. In fact, some of them may not matter at all to your company. That’s the biggest headache of vulnerability management and assessments today—too many alerts and too much noise, resulting in overwhelmed and frustrated CloudSec, vulnerability analysts, and SOC teams. The issue with too many alerts is that vulnerabilities that are actually dangerous to your business get lost in a long list.
That’s why, in this blog post, we’ll look at vulnerability assessments that can help you find and fix critical vulnerabilities—built for cloud.
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How to conduct a vulnerability assessment
Here’s an actionable step-by-step guide to conducting vulnerability assessments. Remember that the focus here is to cut through the noise to identify business critical risks or vulnerabilities that actually matter.
Step 1: Lay the groundwork
If you want to conduct good vulnerability assessments, you need to begin with a bit of preparation and strategy development. Otherwise, your vulnerability assessments may lack clarity and focus between your growing stakeholders in development and IT.
Here are some simple ways you can lay a solid foundation:
List the primary objectives of your vulnerability assessment.
Map your CSPs, cloud services, and shared responsibility models from code to cloud.
Double-check your cloud compliance obligations.
Make a note of your crown jewels (business-critical) data.
Work with other teams to make assessment and remediation more collaborative.
Select the right tools and frameworks for your assessments (more on this soon).
Step 2: Build a comprehensive asset inventory
You can’t discover every critical vulnerability in your cloud environment unless you know what assets you have. Start by building a complete inventory of your cloud assets, from databases and containers to VMs and appliances. Also, develop a process to keep your asset inventory up-to-date always. Lastly, make sure you account for every user (human and machine), endpoint, dependency, API, and network. Leave no stone unturned during this process because even a seemingly unimportant cloud asset could have an attack path to sensitive data.
During this step, remember two things:
Cover your AI infrastructure and assets because they can be full of vulnerabilities.
Map your software development lifecycles because it’s important to discover and fix vulnerabilities during development and develop a strong application security posture.
Step 3: Scan vulnerabilities regularly and automate where possible
Now that you have a clear picture of your cloud environments, it’s time to highlight where vulnerabilities lurk. Start by setting the parameters of your vulnerability assessment tools to scope your assessment. (Pro tip: Never use default settings!) By parameters, we mean that you may want to tinker with the techniques you’re using, like active or passive vulnerability scanning, and automating scans accordingly to save time. You may want to include a specific set of assets or IP addresses to scan and develop your own filters or queries.
Next, initiate your vulnerability scanning tools. Ensure you have tools for database vulnerability scanning, network vulnerability scanning, and web application vulnerability scanning. Also, ensure that your vulnerability assessment tools and scanners base their capabilities on multiple well-known vulnerability databases and catalogs. Think along the lines of the CISA KEV catalog, NIST’s NVD, and the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base.
In some cases, you might want to support your vulnerability scans with more specific penetration tests. These tests can help weed out complex or hidden vulnerabilities in your cloud.
Vulnerability assessment vs. penetration testing
Vulnerability assessments are a more sweeping and high-level evaluation of risks and weaknesses, while penetration tests zero in on very specific components or situations. You may want to use both to cover all bases.
Unlike vulnerability assessments, which detect vulnerabilities in your environment and map your attack surface, penetration tests simulate a real-world world attack to reveal specific weaknesses and attack vectors (entryways). Penetration testing can be a good way to round out your vulnerability assessments.
Step 4: Prioritize vulnerabilities
Your vulnerability scans might reveal a long list of vulnerabilities in your environment, but remember what we said earlier: Not all of these matter. No enterprise has the resources to wipe out every vulnerability it finds, so you’ll need to start prioritizing vulnerabilities based on risk levels from high to low.
“High risk” can mean different things to different organizations, so focus on risks that can lead to sensitive data like PHI, PCI, PII, and business secrets. Additionally, consider factors like severity, exploitability, blast radius, ownership, and whether the compromised asset is mission-essential. Here are some public resources and standards that can help:
CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures): Pinpoints vulnerabilities
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS): Evaluates the severity of vulnerabilities
Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS): Assesses how likely vulnerabilities are to get exploited
Step 5: Analyze vulnerabilities and develop remediation strategies
Although remediation isn’t technically a part of vulnerability assessments, it’s important to start planning how to fix any discovered vulnerabilities. As we’ve seen, you need to start with the most critical vulnerabilities. Study the severity of each vulnerability and understand its implications on your business-critical infrastructure. To make life easy for CloudSec teams, weed out false positives during this step.
For each critical vulnerability, make sure that viable remediation options are available. This could include patching outdated applications, changing the settings on misconfigured resources, and right-sizing permissions.
As CloudSec teams begin remediating critical vulnerabilities, it’s important to conduct subsequent vulnerability scans to validate the remediation. New vulnerabilities may be introduced during remediation, and it’s important to catch those early.
Step 6: Report, evaluate, and improve
You’ve reached the final leg of the process. Here’s how to end it on a great note: Compile all the documentation from the vulnerability assessments. Use your vulnerability management tools to generate comprehensive reports because they can be very important for audits, threat intelligence, and compliance purposes. Also, just like any other cloud security practice, you must continuously iterate on your vulnerability assessment process. Remember: With cloud vulnerability management, there’s always room to improve.
Vulnerability assessment tools
Confused about which vulnerability assessment tools to use? Here are 15 to get you started.
OpenVAS: An open-source vulnerability scanning tool
Aircrack-ng: A suite to discover network vulnerabilities
Nmap: A scanner to discover network vulnerabilities
Masscan: Another scanner to discover network vulnerabilities
Clair: A container vulnerability scanner
Wapiti: A web application–centric vulnerability scanner
Nikto: A web server vulnerability scanner
sqlmap: A penetration testing tool
Arachni: A web app vulnerability scanner
KICS: A code vulnerability scanner
Lynis: An endpoint vulnerability scanner
Amazon Inspector: An AWS workload vulnerability scanner
SecuBat: A web vulnerability scanner
Retire.js: A JavaScript vulnerability scanner
w3af: A web application vulnerability scanner
To learn more about these vulnerability assessment tools and others, check out our blog posts on OSS vulnerability management tools and OSS vulnerability scanners.
Vulnerability assessment template
Here’s an example of a useful security vulnerability assessment template that covers the type of real-world vulnerabilities you’ll find during your assessments. This vulnerability assessment template also gives you a little glimpse into the vulnerability management wonders of Wiz.
So let’s assume you’ve completed the preparation phase with gusto and are in the asset discovery process. By deploying Wiz, you can get a complete inventory of your IT and cloud assets, as seen here:
Next, it’s time to scan these resources to find what vulnerabilities fester unnoticed. Here’s what that looks like with Wiz.
As you can see, Wiz will discover vulnerabilities and prioritize them based on organization-specific risk factors that we call “Toxic Combinations” of risk, derived from attack path permutations, exposure to PII, excess administrator permissions, etc.
Examples of critical vulnerability-related risks could include the following:
Publicly exposed VMs
An exposed API
A critical authorization bypass vulnerability in Docker
A misconfigured database filled to the brim with sensitive PII
For every one of these vulnerabilities, Wiz provides strong remediation guidance but also lets you customize fixes if needed. As highlighted in figure 5, sometimes a simple update to a newer version can transform a critical vulnerability into a secure asset.
Lastly, re-scan your environments, validate fixes, and work on ways to make your vulnerability assessments more effective and holistic. This approach allows vulnerabilities to be discovered, assessed, and remediated across the entire code-to-cloud pipeline.
How Wiz can support vulnerability assessments
If you need a powerful cloud-native tool to conduct vulnerability assessments, look no further than Wiz. Supporting over 120,000 vulnerabilities across 40+ operating systems, Wiz leverages the world's best cloud vulnerability catalogs and combines them with threat intelligence feeds and Wiz research to uncover hidden (or poorly prioritized vulnerabilities) based on business impact.
With agentless deployment and context-based prioritization, Wiz makes alert fatigue a thing of the past. By focusing on critical issues based on your company’s risk factors, Wiz helps find and fix the most potent risks with an impressive MTTR. From code to cloud, Wiz’s vulnerability management capabilities are truly next-level.
Get a demo now to see how Wiz can help enforce vulnerability management best practices and conduct second-to-none security vulnerability assessments that keep your cloud safe.
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