TL;DR: A vulnerability assessment helps you find, evaluate, prioritize, remediate, and monitor security weaknesses across your environment. Start by inventorying your hardware, software, and other assets so you know what vulnerabilities apply, then use a vulnerability scanner to identify known risks. After scanning, assess vulnerabilities by severity and business impact, prioritize high-risk systems and active exploits, remediate issues with patching or vulnerability management tools, and continuously monitor your environment because new vulnerabilities never stop showing up.
A vulnerability assessment shows where your environment is exposed so you can prioritize vulnerabilities and security fixes before attackers exploit them. You'll need to do some homework before diving in — for example, you need to inventory your assets and choose a vulnerability scanning tool before jumping into assessing the vulnerabilities in your environment.
Don’t fret: We’re here to guide you through the entire vulnerability assessment process from start to finish. Let’s get started, shall we?
What is a vulnerability assessment?
A vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing security weaknesses across your systems, software, hardware, and network. It helps you find and analyze the risks lurking in your hardware and software — which is part of the vulnerability management process. Once you complete your vulnerability assessment, you can choose to mitigate high-risk vulnerabilities, or you may decide that some vulnerabilities are okay to leave alone. (That’s called risk acceptance.)
Ultimately, a vulnerability assessment arms you with the information you need to handle the vulnerabilities in your infrastructure.
When should you conduct a vulnerability assessment?
You should conduct vulnerability assessments regularly and after major changes to your environment. For most organizations, that means scanning on a recurring schedule, after new software or hardware deployments, after major configuration changes, and when a critical vulnerability is disclosed.
Common times to run a vulnerability assessment include:
After onboarding new endpoints, servers, or applications
After major operating system or software updates
After network architecture or firewall changes
After a merger, acquisition, or large device migration
When a critical CVE affects software in your environment
On a recurring monthly or quarterly schedule
How do you conduct a vulnerability assessment?
Ultimately, you can break down the vulnerability assessment process into six main steps:
Inventory the assets in your environment
Conduct a vulnerability scan
Assess vulnerabilities across monitored devices
Prioritize vulnerabilities by severity and potential impact
Remediate vulnerabilities
Monitor vulnerabilities
Let’s dig right into what these steps entail.
1. Inventory the assets in your environment
Start a vulnerability assessment by inventorying every asset that could introduce security risk, including endpoints, servers, applications, operating systems, and network devices. Discovering what software, hardware, and other assets live in your environment helps you determine which vulnerabilities (and patches!) are relevant.
Examine your environment's assets, and note software and hardware version numbers. Some of those numbers looking familiar when you read Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday update? Take note!
2. Conduct a vulnerability scan
Use a vulnerability scanner to identify known weaknesses across your inventoried assets. Automating scans helps you find vulnerabilities faster and reduces the manual work required to check every endpoint, application, and system. Once the scanner does its job, you’ll usually have a vulnerability scan report to read. This report shows you the vulnerabilities the scanner finds as well as remediation or mitigation steps you can take.
3. Assess vulnerabilities across monitored devices
Now that you know which vulnerabilities are relevant to you, you can assess them further. Which known vulnerabilities put your organization at the highest risk of downtime? For instance, you might tend to a remote code execution vulnerability or a zero day faster than you remedy a less severe vulnerability — for example, where threat actors could merely gain host information and not much else.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publishes the National Vulnerability Database, which uses CVSS scores to help communicate vulnerability severity. But CVSS is not the same as business risk. Use CVSS as one input alongside exploit activity, asset exposure, affected systems, and potential business impact.
A low CVSS score usually indicates limited exploitability or impact, while a high score signals a more severe vulnerability. Still, prioritize based on context: A lower-scored vulnerability on a public-facing or privileged system may matter more than a higher-scored issue on an isolated test machine.
4. Prioritize vulnerabilities by severity and potential impact
Prioritize vulnerabilities based on exploitability, severity, asset exposure, privilege level, business criticality, and whether the vulnerability is already being actively exploited.
First, you’ll want to prioritize any machines that cybercriminals might target first — for example, machines with elevated privileges. If a threat actor hacks into one of these machines, they can carry out attacks much more quickly because they don’t have to fight as much for privileges. You’ll also want to prioritize any machines with more critical vulnerabilities first.
During an active exploit, time is precious. Setting these priorities will help you properly disperse your team members where they’re most needed to minimize downtime.
5. Remediate vulnerabilities
Remediate vulnerabilities by applying patches, changing configurations, removing unsupported software, or isolating affected systems until a fix is available.
To be frank, vulnerability remediation is not a process you want to tackle manually. It’s a tedious, time-consuming task that just doesn’t end. Once you remediate a vulnerability, five more pop up to take its place.
That’s why we recommend adopting a vulnerability management platform. These platforms help find and remediate vulnerabilities for you so you can focus on other tasks.
6. Monitor vulnerabilities
Monitor vulnerabilities continuously to confirm remediation worked and catch new risks as they appear. After patching or mitigation, rescan affected systems, validate that vulnerabilities are resolved, and document what changed.
That's right: Monitoring vulnerabilities is a never-ending job. It’s a full-time job. It will never disappear from your to-do list. But you can get help to make things a little easier.
If you need some help — and believe you us, you don’t want to manage vulnerabilities by yourself — consider selecting a high-quality vulnerability management tool.
And while you're at it, maybe partner with an endpoint detection and response (EDR) or extended detection and response (XDR) provider for threat protection. The fine folks who work at EDR and XDR companies can weed out the false positives and threats that don’t really impact you. That’s time back in your day to take a long lunch — or, let’s be real, to reset Jerry’s password for the millionth time.
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How to conduct a vulnerability assessment FAQs
What is a security vulnerability?
A security vulnerability is a weakness or error in software, hardware, a network, or a system. Vulnerabilities threaten businesses because cybercriminals often leverage them to launch cyberattacks.
What’s the difference between vulnerability assessment and penetration testing?
Vulnerability assessments help you flag the vulnerabilities that could impact your business. At the surface, penetration testing, or pentesting, assists with identifying vulnerabilities as well — but on a much deeper, more comprehensive level.
Trained security teams perform a penetration test to thoroughly examine the security measures you have in place in your environment. Not only do pentesters find and flag vulnerabilities, but they also use their knowledge of threat intelligence to test out your security controls, weed out false positives from automated tools, and conduct simulated attacks on your environment — all while thinking like a hacker.
What’s the difference between a vulnerability assessment and a risk assessment?
A vulnerability assessment focuses on finding the vulnerabilities that exist in your environment while a risk assessment gives context to those vulnerabilities.
During a vulnerability assessment, you may find that a few applications aren’t up to date, leaving them vulnerable to security threats. During a risk assessment, you’ll contextualize what that actually means. For example, if you don’t patch your dated applications and they’re exploited, what would that mean for your business? What’s the likelihood that they’ll be exploited?
Vulnerability assessments are a bit more technical, while risk assessments tend to focus more on the potential business impact.
How do you read a vulnerability assessment report?
Vulnerability assessment reports differ depending on the vulnerability assessment tool you use, but it’s likely your report has four main sections: an executive summary, scan overview, identified vulnerabilities and security insights, and mitigation and remediation recommendations.
To get the most out of your vulnerability assessment report, you should complete these steps:
Review summary findings
Look at the discovered vulnerabilities
Understand vulnerability details
Prioritize remediation
Validate findings
Develop and implement a remediation plan
Verify remediation
Document findings and actions
Automate the tedious steps of vulnerability management with PDQ. Let PDQ inventory your software and flag vulnerabilities that you can patch in just one click. And should something go wrong with a patch (which would totally not be Microsoft’s fault, of course), use PDQ’s built-in remote desktop control and access feature to get things back up and running again. Try PDQ free for 14 days.
