Vulnerability assessments—as part of your company’s vulnerability management strategy—are an essential step. Through a vulnerability assessment, your organization can find critical vulnerabilities and keep your assets safe. But it is not always clear where to start with such assessments. Accordingly, this blogpost provides a comprehensive checklist for performing vulnerability assessments; in addition, it addresses both organizations and security testers.

In the rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, organizations face an ever-increasing barrage of threats. Traditional vulnerability management, while foundational, often falls short in proactively and continuously identifying and mitigating threats. This necessitates a paradigm shift towards Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), a more dynamic approach that aligns with the complexities of today’s digital environments.

As organizations navigate through the complexities of the digital era, the challenge of accurately identifying and managing their asset inventory has become a critical aspect of their security posture. This task, known as attack surface discovery and asset attribution, involves a delicate balance: identifying all assets that belong to the organization while ensuring that no extraneous ones are included.

Security hygiene and posture management (SHPM) is a relatively new concept, yet it’s fundamental to protecting sensitive systems and data. There’s growing recognition that it’s critical for today’s companies to fully understand assets and their relationships. As a result, more companies are looking to SHPM as a core component of their cybersecurity programs.

In the world of cybersecurity, two terms frequently dominate discussions among professionals: “Attack Surface” and “Attack Vectors”. At first glance, these concepts might appear separate, but they are intricately linked, shaping the way security experts strategize and implement defenses.

External Attack Surface Management(EASM) has emerged as a cybersecurity gold standard – a core component of modern cybersecurity programs. As digital organizations have grown more complex, getting the whole picture of the external attack surface – what’s connected to what and how this could pose danger – is a maze that only-world-class EASM solutions have been able to successfully navigate.

Critical zero-day Citrix CVE-2023-3519 is still being exploited two months after Citrix released a patch. IONIX research found that 19% of the CVE-2023-3519 vulnerabilities are still unmitigated in comparison to only 3% among IONIX customers. In addition, IONIX customers were able to resolve this critical risk three times faster.

In the tech security scene, we’re always on the lookout for new vulnerabilities, especially when they are already exploited in the wild. The latest zero-day CVE-2023-20269 is hitting Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliance VPN features. The attack surface scan conducted by IONIX research on a sample of organizations indicates that 13% of these appliances are potentially vulnerable through at least one interface.

In the tech security scene, we’re always on the lookout for new vulnerabilities, especially when they are already exploited in the wild. The latest zero-day CVE-2023-20269 is hitting Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliance VPN features. The attack surface scan conducted by IONIX research on a sample of organizations indicates that 13% of these appliances are potentially vulnerable through at least one interface.

There are flaws in every organization’s IT infrastructure, along with software that requires patching. These flaws could arise from various sources, such as human errors during software coding. Hackers are always on the lookout to exploit these flaws and applications. However, by following a vulnerability assessment methodology to perform vulnerability assessments, organizations can identify these weaknesses before the cyber adversaries do.