Risk Assessment vs Vulnerability Assessment: A Detailed Guide

The global cybersecurity costs reached around $9.5 trillion in 2023 and it is projected to reach around $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Businesses cannot afford to ignore the proactive security measures as the threats have become more frequent. Regular risk vs vulnerability assessment is a crucial step in maintaining robust security defense in this threat landscape.

What Is Risk Assessment?

Risk assessment is the process of identifying, estimating, and prioritizing the risk to organizations, business processes, information assets, and individuals from certain uncertainties pertaining to the usage of information systems.

An organization usually has yearly or bi-yearly risk assessment drives where they identify financial, operational and compliance risks. The goal of such an assessment is to address the risks before time to avoid exploitation.

What are the different components of risk assessment?

Risk assessment is the process of identifying, estimating, and prioritizing the risk to organizations, business processes, information assets, and individuals from certain uncertainties pertaining to the usage of information systems.

An organization usually has yearly or bi-yearly risk assessment drives where they identify financial, operational and compliance risks. The goal of such an assessment is to address the risks before time to avoid exploitation.

What Is The Risk Matrix and How Does It Work?

The risk matrix is a tool that you can use to evaluate risk based on two primary attributes of risk, namely, likelihood and impact. The risk matrix helps you categorize the risks to your business by mapping them based on categories of likelihood and impact.

The green box in the bottom-left corner marked “LOW” contains the number of risks that are not only rare but also have a negligible impact on the business. The red box in the top-right corner marked “CRITICAL”, that’s where the most critical as well as most probable risks lie. Those are the ones you should be most worried about and should be prioritized.

Why Do Businesses Need a Regular Risk Assessment?

The risk landscape changes with your business goals, and a risk assessment plays a vital role in decision making. A regular risk assessment allows you to adopt a proactive approach towards securing the your assets.

For example, if you run a high-performing marketing website, you must always consider the risk of clickjacking attacks or SEO spam.                

What Is a Vulnerability Assessment?

A vulnerability assessment is a process of identifying and categorizing security vulnerabilities existing in your systems. It usually involves an automated tool that scans your assets for common vulnerabilities by referencing a vulnerability database. 

At the end of the scan, it creates a report where the vulnerabilities are listed, categorized by their severity.

What Are The Steps Of A Vulnerability Assessment?

Asset discovery: The first step of the vulnerability assessment process is to identify all the network as well as physical assets that are to be assessed. With the increment of IoT devices, mobile applications, remote access to the company network, asset discovery is not as simple as it sounds. There is always a chance of missing out on a crucial piece.

Prioritization: Once you have found all the assets, it is important to narrow the focus down to the most important ones. If you are working with limited resources, this becomes a crucial step. Usually, the internet-facing assets and the customer-facing applications are prioritized for scanning.

Vulnerability scan: In this step, an automated vulnerability scanner is used to discover vulnerabilities across the systems. The scanner detects the security vulnerabilities, categorizes them according to their CVSS scores into low, medium, high, and critical severity vulnerabilities. It also recommends ways of fixing the issues.

Risk assessment and remediation: There is an element of risk assessment in the vulnerability assessment process as we mentioned earlier. The location, potential impact, and severity of a certain vulnerability prompt a risk score which in turn helps you decide whether to prioritize that particular vulnerability.

Once you pick the vulnerabilities for remediation, the developers can follow the recommendations of the scanner and fix the issues.

Rescan: A rescan is required to ensure that the vulnerabilities were resolved.Continuous scanning:New vulnerabilities appear every now and then even if you do not make any modifications to your software. Hence continuous scanning is a necessity to ensure the safety of your assets 

Why Do Businesses Need a Regular Vulnerability Assessment?

A routine vulnerability assessment helps identify potential security weaknesses and threats before they can be exploited by attackers. It helps maintain application security and compliance with regulatory requirements.

For example, an e-commerce website can be vulnerable to many vulnerabilties like SQL Injection or insecure payments features which cause serious damage to the business and its users. Regular assessment allows safeguarding the user data and the integrity of the platform.

How Do You Pick a Vulnerability Assessment Tool?

• Does it identify a wide range of vulnerabilities?
• Does it have an easy-to-use dashboard?
• Does it provide Compliance Reporting?
• Does it perform Continuous Scanning?
• Do the reports have Mitigation Suggestions?
• Does it follow Security Standards like OWASP, NIST etc.?

If you get affirmative answers to these questions about a certain tool, you can safely go ahead with it.

Astra’s Pentest for vulnerability assessment

Astra’s Pentest suite provides the users with an interactive dashboard that they can use for monitoring the vulnerabilities as they are found. In the same dashboard, a user can see the risk score assigned to each vulnerability which takes the CVSS score and the potential loss caused by the vulnerability into account. The dashboard also shows you a definitive figure of potential damages through the exploitation of a vulnerability.

Astra’s Pentest comes with a host of features like :

• 10000+ tests, including all tests required for compliance with ISO 27001, SOC2, GDPR, and HIPAA
• Continuous scanning by virtue of CI/CD integration.
• Integration with Slack and Jira
• Detailed vulnerability scanning report with video POCs for remediation
• Zero false positives are ensured by manual pentesters.

You can discuss your security requirements with experts at Astra, and come out with the perfect plan for vulnerability assessment.

Final Thoughts

Both Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Assessment are necessary for an organization to maintain the security standards of their applications and infrastructure. While risk assessment looks for broader risks for the business, vulnerability assessment looks for weaknesses in the security. Combined, they provide a comprehensive security plan to protect their assets and business.

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