What is Vulnerability Scanning? Benefits, Types, and More

Vulnerability scanning definition

Vulnerability scanning is the automated process of discovering and analyzing IT systems and assets for security vulnerabilities, and is a key part of the vulnerability management process. 

Security vulnerabilities are weaknesses and flaws within systems, applications, and assets that threat actors could use to perform targeted cyberattacks.

Some flaws or vulnerabilities that vulnerability scanning looks for include insecure coding, default or weak credentials, misconfigurations, unpatched software, and data exposure.

Vulnerability scanning is sometimes referred to as a vulnerability assessment, but they’re different. The former is the process of discovering vulnerabilities, while the latter involves adding context and risk prioritization.

Organizations can use vulnerability scanning to find vulnerabilities and threats in networks, systems, containers and other ephemeral workloads, CI/CD pipelines, images, registries, and even at runtime.

Not all vulnerability scanners necessarily perform scans for all of the above and may be more focused on one area. What type of vulnerability scanner an organization adopts will depend upon its unique needs.

Why is vulnerability scanning important?

Vulnerability scanning is important because organizations need to know where their vulnerabilities and risks exist in order to remediate them. 

With vulnerability scanning, security teams can discover and remediate vulnerabilities in hardware and networking infrastructure, public cloud assets, software, platforms, and in-house application development.

Vulnerability scanning strengthens security around the software supply chain, as it has become one of the most crucial areas to look for vulnerabilities and weaknesses. More organizations utilize third-party libraries and packages when developing applications, which could introduce vulnerabilities.

Regular vulnerability scanning helps organizations not only comply with industry regulations and best practices, but also shortens the period of time that threat actors can exploit vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability scanning vs. vulnerability management

Understandably, both terms sound very similar, but vulnerability management achieves everything that vulnerability scanning does and more. Vulnerability scanning provides information regarding your organization’s environments and workloads around vulnerabilities and other weaknesses.

Vulnerability scanning is one part of vulnerability management, which is the ongoing process for discovering and remediating vulnerabilities and weaknesses in an organization’s security systems.

Scans are the initial step of vulnerability management. From there, organizations evaluate and prioritize known vulnerabilities based upon how critical they are and their likelihood of impacting the organization. Not all vulnerabilities found will necessarily need to be addressed immediately – it depends on the organization’s unique security needs.

Benefits of vulnerability scanning

Vulnerability scanning helps organizations be more proactive in discovering vulnerabilities before threat actors can use them as an attack vector.

Other vulnerability scanning benefits include:

• Satisfies compliance requirements: Testing security systems for flaws and weaknesses to ensure that personally identifiable information (PII) and other critical data remains protected is important to be compliant with regulations, such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR. They don’t all call for vulnerability scans explicitly, but require some form of security testing.
• Reduces chances of costly data breaches: Performing regular vulnerability scanning as part of a robust vulnerability management program helps organizations discover and remediate weaknesses and flaws before they are used as part of a data breach that causes costly downtime and reputational harm.
• Improves security posture: With vulnerability scans, security teams understand where weaknesses and vulnerabilities exist and can fix them to keep security measures and controls working as intended.
• Strengthens risk management: Finding vulnerabilities and understanding context helps organizations to determine the risk each presents, and enables them to focus on the critical issues first.

Challenges of vulnerability scanning

Vulnerability scanning isn’t without its share of potential challenges to consider when implementing:

• Scanning only for compliance: Performing periodic scans to check off a list of compliance requirements can result in long windows of exposure that threat actors can use to their advantage. Organizations should conduct regular and ongoing scanning, alongside other security measures, to ensure critical data and PII remain protected.
• Snapshot effect: Agentless deployments provide limited insight into vulnerabilities that exist at the time of the scan. Some vulnerability management tools overcome this with agent-based options that provide continuous insight through runtime scanning.
• Only finds known vulnerabilities: On its own, vulnerability scanning can only discover known vulnerabilities, which means it shouldn’t be the only form of vulnerability or threat detection in place. Scanning should be done alongside additional discovery methods, such as runtime detection, to find zero-day vulnerabilities.

How does vulnerability scanning work?

Vulnerability scanning is the crucial first step in a successful vulnerability management program to discover where security vulnerabilities or other threats exist.

The automated scan looks for known vulnerabilities that exist in an organization’s IT infrastructure, systems, and applications. Scans identify common flaws and perform vulnerability fingerprinting to compare against databases of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE).

Scanning can be done via agentless, agent, or a combination of both. Agentless scans are low-maintenance methods that require minimal operation interruption. Scans usually use APIs to rapidly analyze systems for vulnerabilities and only provide a snapshot of how systems are at that one moment in time.

Agent-based scans involve deploying lightweight agents at the kernel level to provide real-time visibility into systems and processes to discover vulnerabilities and other issues.

Using both approaches together ensures that all workloads and systems are continuously scanned for vulnerabilities and other threats to reduce potential security blind spots.

From there, the vulnerability management process uses risk management to determine which vulnerabilities or flaws to remediate first. The vulnerability scan results are compared to the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which ranks and categorizes discovered vulnerabilities.

Types of vulnerability scans

Organizations have a wide variety of vulnerability scanning types available from which to choose. Some vulnerability scanning tools can offer expansive coverage while others specialize in one specific type.

Types of vulnerability scanning tools include:

• Network: A network vulnerability scan identifies potential weaknesses in servers, routers, endpoints, and more that comprise an organization’s network.
• Host: A host vulnerability scan looks for vulnerabilities and weaknesses in servers, hosts, and local machines.
• Cloud: A cloud vulnerability scan involves discovering weaknesses in cloud environments like containers, virtual machines (VM), and serverless functions.
• Database: A database vulnerability scan probes database systems for vulnerabilities or weaknesses, like misconfigurations and weak passwords, and uses credentials to get a comprehensive view of systems.
• Wireless: A wireless vulnerability scan identifies all connected wireless devices and networks, and looks for weaknesses in connection and access.
• Internal scan: An internal vulnerability scan looks for potential issues within an organization’s network and security controls. This helps to identify weaknesses threat actors could use if they get past the network perimeter.
• External scan: An external vulnerability scan looks at internet-facing systems and applications for potential weaknesses that could serve as an initial vector in a cyberattack.
• Credentialed scan: A credentialed vulnerability scan involves using admin credentials to perform a deeper scan of internal systems for vulnerabilities or weaknesses.
• Uncredentialed scan: An uncredentialed vulnerability scan is the opposite, where the scan looks for external weaknesses that an attacker might use without credentials, such as open ports or misconfigurations.

Discover unpatched vulnerabilities and fix them with Sysdig

Attacks won’t wait for fixes. Organizations need more than guesswork or endless alerts. With Sysdig vulnerability management, you get comprehensive vulnerability scans to quickly discover and analyze vulnerabilities.

Scan images in CI/CD pipelines, registries, and ephemeral workloads like containers, VMs, and Kubernetes at runtime for deep visibility into vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Our cloud-native vulnerability management solution goes beyond just scanning, enabling you to prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities in workloads, images, and more. Vulnerability scanning paired with runtime prioritization ensures that all threats are found and remediated quickly.

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