What are vulnerability assessments?
A vulnerability assessment is a security process that involves scouring cloud environments for vulnerabilities like misconfigurations, inadequate access controls, insecure APIs, data and network exposure, and shadow IT.
With an overwhelming number of vulnerabilities lurking across fast-paced cloud environments, high-quality assessments should be a part of every vulnerability management program. Enterprises are taking notice: The growing adoption of vulnerability management is reflected in the global security and vulnerability management market, which is on track to reach more than $24 billion by 2030.
Before you start to worry, most vulnerabilities in your VMs, databases, data, and containers don’t deserve your attention. And that brings us to the other aspect of vulnerability assessments: It’s not just about finding any random vulnerability. It’s about finding dangerous vulnerabilities.
The Ultimate Vulnerability Management Playbook [AWS Edition]
Actionable steps to identify, assess, and mitigate AWS vulnerabilities, ensuring your cloud infrastructure is protected.
Download PDF
Here are the typical steps involved in an effective vulnerability assessment:
Planning: Establishing objectives, mapping crown jewels, selecting tools, setting up teams, and understanding shared responsibility models
Inventorying: Identifying every single cloud asset, from VMs and APIs to endpoints and AI resources
Scanning: Conducting automated scans on cloud assets to reveal vulnerabilities
Prioritizing: Examining deep contexts and connections to sensitive data to establish a vulnerability hierarchy
Strategizing: Assessing vulnerability severity and planning remediation procedures
Reporting: Formalizing documentation from the entire assessment process
Improving: Using insights gathered to make proactive improvements
Tools and techniques for vulnerability assessments
Selecting tools
The effectiveness of vulnerability assessments and your overall vulnerability management program depends on the quality of tools you use. Here are some common vulnerability assessment tools:
Nessus: A proprietary vulnerability scanner
OpenVAS: An open-source vulnerability scanner
Nmap: A network vulnerability scanner
OSSEC: An endpoint vulnerability scanner
Gitleaks: A code vulnerability scanner
If you want to check out more vulnerability assessment tools, look here and here. (When you’re shopping for tools, remember: To identify vulnerabilities in your cloud environments, you need solutions and scanners that tap into vulnerability databases like Wiz’s Vulnerability Database.)
Strategies
At the end of the day, it’s pretty simple: You should choose vulnerability assessment types based on your vulnerability management goals. Options include host-based, network-based, social engineering, and container vulnerability assessments.
Also, you should mix and match passive and active vulnerability scanning. Active scanning involves direct probing of systems to identify vulnerabilities, which can generate network traffic and alerts. Passive scanning, on the other hand, inspects existing network traffic to uncover vulnerabilities without directly interacting with assets. Note that active/passive scanning is different from credentialed/non-credentialed scanning, which refers to whether or not login access is provided during scans.
Benefits and limitations of vulnerability assessments
Without question, vulnerability assessments are a cornerstone of your vulnerability management and cloud security program. Vulnerability assessments help provide comprehensive coverage of cloud environments, which is crucial as businesses adopt more complex IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS architectures. Another benefit is proactive risk identification, a boon in high-octane cloud estates. All in all, what you get with vulnerability assessments is a highly automated and effective way to catch and kill cloud vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability assessments also have limitations. That’s why context is critical—without it, teams waste time chasing alerts that pose little or no real risk. Effective platforms filter noise by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on exploitability and business impact.
Also, vulnerability assessments aren’t that effective at simulating real-world attack scenarios. For that, you need a different kind of cloud security test.
Understanding penetration testing
What is penetration testing?
Penetration testing involves simulating attacks to test your cloud attack vectors, weaknesses, and incident response plans. It’s a form of ethical hacking, which is when hacking methodologies and weapons are used for security rather than nefarious purposes. The penetration testing market will reach almost $4 billion by 2029, which shows that businesses are making them a mainstay in their vulnerability management programs.
You can furnish penetration testers with varying degrees of information based on the types of tests you want. Tests with absolutely no insights about the victim’s system are called black-box tests. Tests with partial information provided are gray-box tests. And tests with all the information provided are white-box tests. A healthy vulnerability management program will have all three.
When conducting penetration tests, ethical hackers will kick things off with a planning phase, where they figure out the objectives of the test. Once the planning is over, it’s time for the execution phase, where the testers will engage in black-, gray-, or white-box tests. The last component is reporting, where testers document and formalize findings and next steps.
Let’s break down the penetration testing methodology into smaller steps:
Reconnaissance: Accumulating details about the victim’s system and developing attack strategies and methods
Scanning: Pinpointing exploitable vulnerabilities across the target’s cloud environments and probing attack vectors to learn how to evade detection and defense
Exploitation: Conducting a controlled real-world attack (social engineering, man-in-the-middle, SQL injections, etc.) simulation on discovered vulnerabilities
Post-exploitation: Reverting the tested cloud environments to their original state and preparing reports with test results
Tools and techniques for penetration testing
To conduct penetration tests, you need a strong toolkit. Here are some examples of penetration testing tools:
| Tool | Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Port scanners | To identify open or available ports on devices |
|
| Password crackers | To shine a light on weak credentials and passwords |
|
| Vulnerability scanners | To scan cloud assets for vulnerabilities and bugs |
|
| Packet analyzers | To keep an eye on network traffic |
|
| Platforms and Frameworks | Tools and environments used to support comprehensive penetration testing | Metasploit
|
With these tools, ethical hackers can use a variety of different techniques based on the objectives of their tests. For example, if the goal is to understand whether a cloud environment is susceptible to phishing, they can use social engineering penetration tests. If the goal is to uncover network or application vulnerabilities, then network or application penetration testing is what’s needed.
Benefits and limitations of penetration testing
Penetration testing can do something that many other types of vulnerability management practices can’t: attack cloud environments with real-world scenarios to see how their fortifications respond. The best thing about realistic attack simulations is that businesses gain incredibly detailed vulnerability insights instead of surface-level information. The high-level benefits? A stronger cloud security posture, fewer critical incidents, and stronger incident response plans.
Just like vulnerability assessments, penetration testing has certain limitations. First, there’s always a risk of facing or even causing disruptions because of the highly realistic nature of the attack. Because penetration testing in live cloud environments can pose risks and may require prior approval from cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure), many organizations conduct these tests in sandboxed or cloned environments that mirror production settings without impacting real workloads.
Second, penetration testing isn’t for beginners; it requires pretty advanced ethical hacking skills, which means that personnel are either hard to come by or expensive. And let’s not forget that penetration testing is always going to have a more limited scope than other vulnerability management exercises because it homes in on specific exploitable targets rather than scanning huge swaths of the enterprise cloud.
Comparing vulnerability assessments and penetration testing: How to choose
We’ve finally arrived at the big question: How do you choose between vulnerability assessments and penetration testing? Do you even have to choose? Here’s a simple side-by-side comparison to help answer those questions.
| Vulnerability assessments | Penetration testing | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Vulnerability assessments focus on finding and prioritizing known and unknown vulnerabilities in cloud environments. | Penetration testing focuses on targeting cloud environments with hyperrealistic attack scenarios to test defenses and uncover vulnerabilities. |
| Methodology | Vulnerability assessments can be continuous or periodic and are often automated. The assessments involve planning, scanning cloud assets, prioritizing vulnerabilities, making remediation plans, and reporting on the process. | Penetration testing is a form of ethical hacking that uses real-world attack techniques to prove how an adversary could breach cloud environments and pinpoint what defenses need to be set up to counter that. |
| Outcomes | The outcomes of vulnerability assessments include a complete and prioritized list of vulnerabilities in scanned cloud assets, suggested fixes, and detailed documentation on the entire process that can help with improving the overall security and compliance posture. | The outcomes of penetration testing include proof of exploitable vulnerabilities across cloud assets, a sequential breakdown of a real-world attack, comprehensive reports and recommendations, and applicable knowledge to enhance incident response plans and drive attack surface reduction. |
Choosing between vulnerability assessments and penetration testing comes down to what you want to achieve. Different use cases demand different kinds of vulnerability management strategies.
Many regulatory frameworks, like PCI DSS and HIPAA, require regular vulnerability assessments and recommend penetration testing as a best practice.
For example, if you’re doing a compliance check to see if your cloud meets various regulatory requirements like HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, or CCPA, vulnerability assessments are a great tool because they provide a comprehensive topology of vulnerabilities in your environments, and the reports are useful for compliance audits.
But if you want to explore the possibility and repercussions of a real-world situation or give your incident response plans a once-over, penetration testing is the answer. Since it gives you a firsthand look at how your cloud responds to actual attacks, you’ll have all the actionable information you need to reinforce your cloud, from tweaking configurations and tightening access controls to limiting lateral movement and expediting incident response plans.
If you want your vulnerability management program to cover all bases, then you should use vulnerability assessments and penetration testing in tandem. By doing so, you’ll elevate your cloud security in meaningful and measurable ways. For effective vulnerability management, you need a strong unified platform, one that’s capable of understanding deep cloud, business, and workload contexts to reveal vulnerabilities that actually matter to your organization.
How Wiz provides a context-based approach to vulnerabilities
Wiz’s unified vulnerability management solution is a powerful foundation to support vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. Wiz contextualizes vulnerabilities, so you’ll know which vulnerabilities really matter to your organization and which ones you can factor into your risk appetite. Unlike traditional tools that generate long lists of issues, Wiz shows you which vulnerabilities are truly exploitable—based on toxic combinations like external exposure, internet reachability, identity permissions, and proximity to sensitive data. This means your team can cut through the noise and act on what actually matters.
Wiz can help build a unified vulnerability management program through the following capabilities:
Graph-based contextual analysis: By using the Wiz Security Graph, Wiz Cloud visualizes attack paths and prioritizes threat remediation workflows. This is crucial for understanding how vulnerabilities can be exploited, similar to what penetration testing would reveal.
Automated compliance and risk prioritization: Wiz automates compliance checks and prioritizes risks based on their potential impact, helping you focus on the most critical issues first. This feature lines up with the primary goal of vulnerability assessments: finding and fixing your biggest security gaps.
Shift-left code security: Wiz Code enables shift-left security by scanning infrastructure-as-code, container images, and application code for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities before they reach production. This reduces the number of issues that make it to runtime, complementing both vulnerability assessments and penetration testing.
Unified risk engine: Wiz correlates risks across all factors, including network exposures and identities, to identify toxic combinations. Just like penetration testing, this comprehensive risk analysis provides a clear picture of potential attack vectors.
Get a demo to see Wiz’s unified vulnerability management capabilities in action, or meet with a Wiz expert to get a 1-on-1 free vulnerability assessment.
