Vulnerability Scanning for SMBs

A small entrepreneur-led digital marketing agency was having a regular morning with client calls, design presentations, and ad discussions. Suddenly, every team member was locked out of their accounts and couldn’t access their e-mails, cloud folders, or even the company bank account – their data had been taken hostage digitally.

This isn’t just a cautionary tale. It’s what happened to small and medium businesses (SMBs) like the Heritage Company and Lee Enterprises—both forced to shut down after devastating cyberattacks. And they’re not alone.

According to the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), 60% of small businesses that suffer a cyberattack are forced to close within six months. These businesses are prime targets because they are digitally dependent but critically underprepared, like sitting ducks in a warzone.

While most SMB owners understand the need for essential tools like vulnerability scanning, their practical implementation presents challenges such as outdated reactive security measures, limited in-house expertise, budget constraints, and the overwhelming volume of vulnerabilities to address.

Thus, SMBs don’t just need scanners—they need context-aware, automated vulnerability management that evolves with their business.

Limitations of Traditional Vulnerability Scanning for SMBs

1. Information Overload 

When presented with a report listing hundreds, sometimes thousands of potential vulnerabilities, many small business owners simply don’t know where to begin resolving them or mitigating their adverse effects.

Moreover, most SMBs don’t have dedicated security analysts who sift through these reports all day. Today’s IT teams are overworked, juggling a million other tasks, and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of alerts, software updates, and network troubleshooting.

This can lead to delays, uncertainty about which vulnerabilities to prioritize, and an inability to understand which poses the highest risk. In a nutshell, this is the typical “volume vs. value” problem that SMBs usually face.

2. Lack of Context

Traditional scan results usually include a flood of alerts, overwhelming security teams with information. This is akin to receiving a daily intelligence report with several sightings of minor skirmishes when a full-scale invasion is imminent. 

This “alert fatigue” can lead to a dangerous sense of complacency, distracting teams from the most critical threats. It also creates the challenge of prioritizing high-risk vulnerabilities, only exacerbated by the lack of context that comes with traditional vulnerability scans. 

These scans fail to provide much information about how exploitable or relevant that vulnerability is within the specific SMB’s environment and crucial context on how these vulnerabilities might impact business KPIs such as impact on revenue, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, compliance, etc. 

3. Manual Inefficiencies

Adding to the frustration of this situation, security teams often waste their precious time chasing down false positives, which are vulnerabilities that don’t exist or aren’t relevant to the specific business’s enterprise. They also usually worry about possible false negatives, vulnerabilities the traditional scanner could have missed entirely. 

This can lead to several issues, including a waste of time and resources, financial loss due to data breaches caused by missed vulnerabilities, and difficulty computing an accurate ROI for the vulnerability scanning process.

4. Tool Sprawl

Finally, many SMBs fall into what’s colloquially called the “tooling trap.” This refers to getting stuck in a cycle of purchasing different tools for every perceived security gap they find in their current tools. Eventually, this can lead to a tool sprawl, a collection of disparate systems that don’t integrate well and result in more complexity than clarity. 

Rather than having a bird’s eye view of their security, they are left jumping from dashboard to dashboard, collating data manually, communicating different inefficiencies in each tool, and finally feeling less secure than ever. 

Developing an Effective Strategy for End-to-End Vulnerability Management

1. Why Should SMBs Prepare for Today’s Threat Landscape?

To navigate choppy waters safely and survive, sailors need to use different tools, techniques, and thought processes. A simple compass won’t help them. To stay safe, they should develop the skills of monitoring the horizon, gauging wind levels and direction, and assessing weather patterns.

In the same way, SMBs cannot rely on a reactive or static approach to dealing with vulnerabilities in this digitally unsafe environment. This would be like sailing blindly and hoping for the weather to cooperate even when you see storm clouds. 

2. Define Scope

• Create a roadmap of your plan to secure yourself from vulnerabilities and data breaches. Start by determining the most vital data and systems that need protection—customer data, inventory data, financial systems, etc. 
• Analyze the threats that are the most relevant for your business. Look at what your industry’s regulations recommend protection against and your operational processes. This would differ for healthcare providers, financial advisors, retail services, B2B SAAS, etc. 

3. Create a Multi-Layered Defense Strategy 

Here’s a small checklist on the type of digital security you should have in place in the order that you should prioritize them:

1. Perimeter Security: Effective firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) should be your first defense against unauthorized access and traffic.
2. Endpoint Security: Next, you can install antivirus, anti-malware, and endpoint detection and response technologies (EDR) to help protect specific devices like laptops and desktops. 
3. Application Security: To continually protect yourself from threats, you must regularly test your web apps, mobile apps, APIs, networks, and cloud infrastructure for possible vulnerabilities. Use a third-party company specialized in vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. 
4. Data Security: To keep your data safe, protect all team members’ devices and accounts. Enable MFA, encrypt your data, implement access controls, and employ data loss prevention (DLP) solutions. 
5. Employee Security Awareness: Conduct regular training sessions to sensitize your employees about phishing attacks, the best cybersecurity practices, and safe browsing habits.

Benefits of Strategic Vulnerability Management for SMBs

1. Customization

A “scan and patch” mentality may have been enough for the threat landscape of the past, but today, SMBs require a well-thought-out vulnerability management strategy that conserves time and money. The management plan should also be tailored to each SMB’s unique needs and risk profiles. 

2. Risk-Based Prioritization

Not all vulnerabilities are equally harmful to any given company. Like triaging the wounded, risks should be prioritized based on urgency and criticality levels. A vulnerability generally regarded as being high-severity could pose little to no risk to a specific business, owing to its unique environment. 

At the same time, a medium-severity vulnerability in a critical production system could be catastrophic to the SMB. Risk-based prioritization helps SMBs assess the potential impact of a vulnerability on their business operations by looking at factors like:

• Asset Value: How critical is the affected system or data to the business?
• Exploitability: How easy is it for an attacker to exploit the vulnerability?
• Potential Business Disruption: Would it impact operations, reputation, and finances if the vulnerability were exploited?

3. Automated and Continuous Scanning

With new vulnerabilities emerging daily and hackers using new techniques to breach systems and steal data, the only way for SMBs to stay on top of them is through automated, continuous scanning. 

This would help their security teams focus on critical issues and allow them to tackle each vulnerability as it arises rather than waiting for a scheduled scan to determine whether there are any. 

4. Ease of Integration

Vulnerability scanning does not exist in a vacuum and should easily integrate with your existing systems. These include security management platforms, communication channels, cloud platforms, networks, and APIs. 

If the software automatically raises a ticket for each identified vulnerability to the security team, it helps them efficiently resolve it using various integrated tools.

5. Vulnerability Scanning as Part of a Broader Security Posture

Vulnerability scanning is not done independently but is an essential part of an overall security strategy that includes firewalls, staff security awareness training, incident response planning, and systems that detect any intrusion. By considering vulnerability management as one piece of a larger puzzle, SMBs can create a much more effective security program. 

Next Steps for SMBs 

1. Develop a Vulnerability Management Policy

SMBs struggle to create a well-thought-out plan to execute their high-level security goals. Instead of listing actionable processes, they usually have vague documents outlining these goals with no plan to achieve them. To resolve this issue, key stakeholders from IT and management should be involved in developing the policy. 

When creating the roadmap document, use clear, concise language and avoid jargon that can confuse other team members. Ensure you have a list of the steps involved in this process, and review the policy regularly as the organization changes or emerging threats occur.

This roadmap should clarify the team members working on each step, from vulnerability detection to remediation, and set clear responsibilities. It should also include details such as the frequency of scans, the standard operating procedure for every event, the basis for risk assessment, and the planned time for remediation processes.

 2. Choose the Right Tools

With so many vulnerability scanners available today, this is a much more complex decision than you think. SMBs struggle with choosing the right tool and can fall into the trap of tool sprawl, which leads to inefficient tools that compromise their systems rather than provide security.

When selecting the right tool, analyze your organization’s size, budget, ease of use, scalability, and integration with your existing software system. Beyond these factors and your business’s needs, avoid being swayed by useless, excessive features. 

While cost is an important consideration, remember that a cheaper tool that doesn’t meet all your security needs can prove to be expensive in the future. 

3. Invest in Training

As a business owner, it’s essential to prioritize human error in cybersecurity. SMBs often fail to train their employees to deal with cybersecurity breach attempts, such as phishing attacks and insider threats. 

To prevent these attacks, you should regularly conduct security sensitivity training for your teams and phishing attack simulations to assess their security skills. Also, provide your team with the proper training to use the security tools you choose, or they will be rendered useless.

The security team can work much more efficiently by being trained to interpret reports, prioritize the correct vulnerabilities, and learn how to remediate them. 

4. Regularly Review & Refine

It’s important to remember that vulnerability management is not a “set it and forget it” security solution. Many small businesses make the mistake of scanning for vulnerabilities once or twice but not periodically, which creates blind spots and can lead to more emerging threats.

Only by continuously reviewing and refining your vulnerability management system, ascertaining the effectiveness of your plan, tracking performance metrics, and staying up to date with system threats can you positively impact your security. 

The Future of Vulnerability Management for SMBs

1. AI and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning aims to revolutionize vulnerability scanning and risk assessment. The future of risk management involves AI integrations that can anticipate threats before they materialize, acting as a proactive shield against cyberattacks.

AI algorithms will be able to identify vulnerabilities not just as individual entities but also predict how different vulnerabilities can react to each other to pose a more significant threat to the business entity than individually. 

Machine learning can analyze data to find patterns in this manner and predict threats much more accurately than traditional scanning. The goal is to reform SMB vulnerability scanning by developing proactivity in combating vulnerabilities rather than tackling them as they arise.

2. Cloud-Native Security

The dependency on cloud-based platforms has steadily grown in recent years, creating new vulnerabilities. SMBs also opt for cloud-based data storage solutions because of their scalability, flexibility, and ease of collaboration, which just extends their attack surface. 

Cloud-native security is focused on keeping your entire cloud environment safe through automated vulnerability scanning for SMEs. 

3. Pentesting as a Service

Pentesting-as-a-service (PTaaS) combines automated scanning methods with the expertise of security professionals who can manually perform penetration testing. These experts are usually seasoned, ethical hackers simulating real cyberattacks to find and exploit vulnerabilities that a scanner could miss. 

Subscribing to a PTaaS service makes sense, especially for SMBs, as they can avoid the overhead costs of building an in-house team to look for vulnerabilities.

At Astra Security, our automated scanner scans platforms such as APIs, mobile and web apps, networks, and cloud platforms. We then provide vetted scans, during which our security expert manually reviews the scanner’s reports to ensure no false positives. Combined with our manual pentesting services, this process thoroughly finds even the most hidden vulnerabilities. 

Final Thoughts

SMBs are the backbone of any economy, but at the same time, they’re also the primary target for cyberattacks. Traditional vulnerability scanning focuses more on a “scan and patch” approach rather than continuous testing and prevention of attacks, which is outdated and doesn’t keep businesses safe. 

By shifting towards a security plan that prioritizes vulnerabilities based on their risk levels to your company and having an automated continuous scanner, SMBs will be much closer to achieving proactive security instead of reactive security,

We encourage SMBs to create a vulnerability management plan unique to their needs, spend time and resources finding the right tool, and ensure security awareness within their teams. With AI/machine learning integrations rapidly evolving vulnerability scanning, now is the best time to jump on the automation bandwagon. 

Instead of waiting for a breach to occur and remediating its consequences, take control of your security today.

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