The days of bulky, on-premise server racks are fading fast. Businesses are migrating to cloud infrastructures for their inherent scalability and operational flexibility. In 2023 alone, two out of five businesses experienced a cloud data breach, with an average cost of 3.61 million in hybrid cloud environments. Here’s where cloud vulnerability scanners step in!
They don’t just identify vulnerabilities but enable continuously vigilant cyber security without sacrificing operational efficiency.
While many scanners are available, some miss critical vulnerabilities, while others flag low-priority security gaps irrelevant to your industry. Thus, a tailored approach is key. Choose a scanner that caters to your unique security needs for optimal effectiveness.
List of Top Cloud Vulnerability Scanner
Why is Astra Vulnerability Scanner the Best Scanner?
- We’re the only company that combines automated & manual pentest to create a one-of-a-kind pentest platform.
- Vetted scans ensure zero false positives.
- Our intelligent vulnerability scanner emulates hacker behavior & evolves with every pentest.
- Astra’s scanner helps you shift left by integrating with your CI/CD.
- Our platform helps you uncover, manage & fix vulnerabilities in one place.
- Trusted by the brands you trust like Agora, Spicejet, Muthoot, Dream11, etc.
7 Best Cloud Vulnerability Scanners [Reviewed]
1. Astra Security
Key Features:
- Platform: SaaS
- Pentest Capabilities: Continuous automated scans with 9300+ tests, manual pentests
- Accuracy: Zero false positives
- Compliance Scanning: OWASP, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO27001, SOC2
- Expert Remediation Assistance: Yes
- Workflow Integration: Slack, JIRA, GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, etc.
- Price: Starting at $1999/yr
Astra Security offers expert pentesting for your cloud-hosted application. Our pentest suite is designed to improve cloud vulnerability assessment while ensuring convenience for users.
Our security experts review your security posture internally and externally, ensuring that you follow the best security practices and are protected from hackers. We use industry benchmarks like OWASP and CSI standards to provide high-quality cloud web security.
Expert scans are conducted in the cloud, so your servers are not stressed. Our vulnerability management dashboard allows you to collaborate with security experts for remediation, and we help you run compliance-specific scans to improve audit readiness. Astra specialises in Google cloud vulnerability scanning and you can protect your GCP completely using our scanner.
Let experts find security gaps in your cloud infrastructure
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2. Qualys
Key Features:
- Platform: SaaS
- Types of Pentests: Automated scanning
- CI/CD Integration: Yes
- Custom Remediation Plan: Yes
- Price: Trial starts at $500/month, customized pricing
Qualys Cloud Platform is a cloud security scanner that provides a single window to view all your assets, vulnerabilities, and compliance status. It also provides cloud agents for all your endpoints.
It gathers, evaluates, and correlates information about security, IT, and compliance for all on-site and in-the-cloud assets. Qualys Cloud Platform provides clients with real-time network analysis for attack prevention.
3. Aqua
Key Features:
- Platform: SaaS
- Types of Pentests: Automated scanning
- CI/CD Integration: Yes
- Custom Remediation Plan: Yes
- Price: Custom pricing upon request
Aqua Security is a cloud-native security platform with several features, including cloud vulnerability scanning, runtime protection, and compliance management.
It provides an agent for scanning your cloud infrastructure and delivering runtime protection and compliance management.
4. Orca Security
Key Features:
- Platform: SaaS
- Types of Pentests: Automated agentless scanning
- CI/CD Integration: Yes
- Custom Remediation Plan: Yes
- Price: starts at $50,000/year
Orca Security promotes a new approach to cloud vulnerability scanning called SideScanning. This agentless scanning approach collects data directly from your cloud configuration.
Orca helps you cover vulnerabilities that might have escaped the agent-based vulnerability scanning solutions, prioritize risks, and provide an overview of vulnerability correlation. It also supports over 40 CIS benchmarks.
5. Wiz
Key Features:
- Platform: SaaS
- Types of Pentests: Automated scanning
- CI/CD Integration: Yes
- Custom Remediation Plan: Yes
- Workflow Integration: Slack, JIRA, GitHub, etc.
- Compliance Scanning: SOC2, CIS, ISO 27001, etc.
- Price: Customised pricing
Wiz offers a simple approach to cloud-based web security. It leverages a one-time cloud API setup for continuous workload assessment, eliminating ongoing agent management and streamlining the scanning process.
Wiz’s deep assessment capabilities uncover hidden vulnerabilities within nested dependencies, including critical threats like Log4Shell and CISA KEV exploits. This ensures a comprehensive understanding of your cloud environment’s security posture.
6. Vulcan Cyber
Key Features:
- Platform: SaaS
- Types of Pentests: Integrates with existing vulnerability assessment tools (does not perform its own pentesting)
- Custom Remediation Plan: Yes
- Risk-Based Prioritization: Yes
- Tool Integration: Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, etc..
- Price: Customised pricing
Vulcan Cyber offers a cloud vulnerability management solution beyond detecting vulnerabilities. It empowers security and DevOps teams to proactively manage their cloud security posture by focusing on identification, prioritization, remediation, and reporting.
It streamlines cloud security by integrating with platforms like Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, etc., as well as 100+ security tools. It also helps enrich the results of vulnerability assessments even though it doesn’t pentest on its own.
7. Intruder
Key Features:
- Platform: SaaS
- Types of Pentests: Automated agentless scanning
- CI/CD Integration: Yes
- Custom Remediation Plan: Yes
- Workflow Integration: Slack, JIRA, GitHub
- Price: starts at $2,000/year
Intruder’s cloud vulnerability scanner uses an agent to scan your infrastructure for vulnerabilities. Also known as Cloudbot, it integrates with your cloud accounts to scan the environment continually with every update and prioritize vulnerabilities by business context.
It automatically looks for new cloud services and runs a scan whenever there are any changes made to the cloud environment, while also providing integration with several cloud platforms at once.
How Does a Cloud Vulnerability Scanner Work?
A cloud vulnerability scanner is a tool that automates identifying vulnerabilities in cloud-hosted applications.
It probes into a given target system by sending certain requests, monitoring responses, and comparing those responses with details from a vulnerability database. If these responses signal an anomaly, the scanner flags an issue and reports it.
The scanner helps you address a number of tricky security issues, such as misconfigurations, unauthorized access, insecure interfaces, and account hijacking.
Cloud Vulnerability Scanning in 5 Steps
1. Mapping Cloud Services
The first step of cloud vulnerability scanning is to create a comprehensive map of your cloud environment, whether AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. The scanner identifies services that you use across cloud platforms to create a network map.
For example, within AWS, we would check for RDS databases, S3 storage buckets, and EC2 virtual machines to map them out and build a foundation for further analysis.
2. Cloud Security Review
With the cloud landscape mapped, the scanner carefully reviews the security configurations of these services. If left uncorrected, misconfigurations can result in security gaps.
This review process compares the configurations with the industry’s best security practices while flagging any deviations that might create cloud security vulnerabilities, effectively highlighting critical areas requiring immediate attention.
3. Cloud Vulnerability Scan
Once the security posture is evaluated, we can dive deep into each client’s cloud service. Either a scanner or a security expert scans for CVEs specific to that particular cloud to find potential weaknesses that malicious hackers could exploit.
4. Vulnerability Prioritization
The scanner employs a risk scoring mechanism, such as CVSS, to prioritize identified vulnerabilities and misconfigurations according to their criticality.
The scoring system factors in various aspects, including the vulnerability’s exploitability, potential impact on your systems, and ease of remediation. By prioritizing threats, you can ensure that security teams can focus their efforts on addressing critical issues first.
5. Remediation
In the final stage, the scanner provides detailed remediation plans to tackle identified vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. These plans outline the specific steps required to rectify security gaps.
Armed with this actionable guide, your security engineers can effectively reproduce and patch vulnerabilities, adjust configurations, and ultimately fortify your cloud environment to protect it against security threats.
6 Features to Look For in a Cloud Vulnerability Scanner
1. In-Depth Configuration Reviews
A good cloud vulnerability scanner should not only map your cloud services but also assess their configurations in detail against industry best security practices. This involves evaluating configurations for security weaknesses that could arise from misconfigurations.
Look for a scanner with detailed reports highlighting deviations from best practices and potential security implications.
2. Agent & Agentless Scanning
Cloud security testing tools offer two primary scanning methodologies: agent-based and agentless.
- Agent-based scanning: This method involves deploying lightweight agents on your cloud instances. These “agents” in your servers offer deeper inspection capabilities, enabling more comprehensive vulnerability management in the cloud. However, agent deployment can introduce additional management overhead.
- Agentless scanning: This approach leverages the cloud provider’s APIs or external SaaS integration to gather information and scan your environment without installing an agent. While a convenient, non-intrusive option, agentless scanners typically offer less granular vulnerability detection than their counterparts.
The approach that’s best for you largely depends on your specific needs. If the in-depth analysis is a priority, agent-based scanning is preferable. However, if ease of deployment and minimal impact on your cloud environment are more important, then agentless scanning would be a suitable choice.
3. Updated with Latest CVEs & Beyond
A scanner should be able to stay updated on the ever-evolving threat landscape. Ensure that it boasts a continuously updated vulnerability database that tests for all the latest CVEs relevant to your cloud platform.
The aim should be to go beyond CVEs and identify zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits specific to the cloud services you are using.
4. Continuous Scanning
Cloud environments are dynamic and constantly evolving. Your vulnerability scanner should be able to adapt to this by offering continuous scanning capabilities.
This ensures that any changes to your cloud infrastructure, such as adding & removing services or configuration adjustments, are promptly identified and re-evaluated for security vulnerabilities. Continuous scanning allows you to maintain a strong proactive security posture by identifying potential threats before they can be exploited.
5. Compliance Mapping
A cloud security assessment tool with compliance mapping capabilities is invaluable for organizations subject to regulatory compliance mandates (e.g., ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, etc.).
This feature allows the scanner to map identified vulnerabilities to specific compliance controls, streamlining your compliance efforts. Establishing a clear link between vulnerabilities and compliance requirements helps you prioritize remediation plans and demonstrate adherence to regulatory frameworks.
6. Vulnerability Correlation
Advanced vulnerability scanners go beyond analyzing individual vulnerabilities and assess how seemingly disparate vulnerabilities, when combined, could be exploited to create a more significant security breach.
For instance, the scanner might identify a low-severity vulnerability in an EC2 instance and a medium-severity vulnerability in an S3 bucket. In isolation, these vulnerabilities seem manageable and probably lower in the fixing priority.
However, vulnerability correlation could reveal that exploiting both vulnerabilities together could lead to a complete data breach.
Final thoughts
Cloud vulnerability scanners are essential for safeguarding your cloud environment. They help automate vulnerability detection and prioritization, freeing up security teams to focus on proactive threat hunting and remediation.
Astra Security stands out for its hands-on approach, which emphasizes thorough testing using vulnerability correlation, zero false positives, and a user-friendly dashboard.
Meanwhile, Wiz conducts continuous workload assessment through a one-time API setup, and Qualys provides a view of all your cloud assets, vulnerabilities, and compliance testing.
Ultimately, the best choice depends on your specific needs and budget. When making your decision, consider factors like the type of pentest required, desired level of automation, agent-based vs. agentless scanning, integration capabilities, and more.
FAQs
1. What are some cloud vulnerabilities?
Some common security vulnerabilities in the cloud are: 1. Open S3 buckets 2. Misconfigured APIs 3. Lack of multifactor authentication for users 4. Incomplete data deletion. etc.
2. How long does a cloud security scan take?
Scanning a cloud infrastructure with an automated scanner can take up to 24 hours. Detecting and reporting all vulnerabilities by engaging manual pentest can take up to 7 days.
3. Does a cloud configuration review impact the performance of the cloud services?
Automated penetration testing tools can generate high volumes of traffic and consume resources, leading to temporary performance degradation.
Manual penetration testing can be controlled and paced to reduce the risk of performance impact.
Explore Our Vulnerability Scanning Series
This post is part of a series on Vulnerability Scanning. You can also check out other articles below.
- Chapter 1: How Vulnerability Scanning Works?
- Chapter 2: Types Of Vulnerability Scanning
- Chapter 3: Vulnerability Scanning Report: Things You Should Know
- Chapter 4: Best Vulnerability Scanners of 2024
- Chapter 5: Best Web Application Vulnerability Scanners
- Chapter 6: Top Cloud Vulnerability Scanners for AWS, GCP & Azure
- Chapter 7: Top 7 GCP Vulnerability Scanning Tools
- Chapter 8: 7 Best AWS Vulnerability Scanners
- Chapter 9: Best Free Vulnerability Scanners
- Chapter 10: Best Android Vulnerability Scanners
- Chapter 11: Best Vulnerability Assessment Tools
