In this lesson, we're going to discuss
identifying vulnerabilities.
Identifying vulnerabilities is a systematic practice
of spotting and categorizing weaknesses in a system,
network, or application that could potentially be exploited.
Identifying the vulnerabilities in your systems is critical
so that we can increase the security of our systems,
prevent unauthorized access,
and maintain the integrity
of our organization's systems and data.
There are many methods used
to identify vulnerabilities including vulnerability
scanning, application security techniques,
penetration testing, and security and processing auditing.
Now first we have vulnerability scanning.
Vulnerability scanning is an automated method
of probing networks, systems
and applications to discover potential vulnerabilities.
Vulnerability scans play a vital role
in strengthening the security of your network
by discovering any known vulnerabilities in your devices
or applications.
There are many different tools available
to help you conduct a vulnerability scan,
including things like Nessus and OpenVAS.
Now, these tools can analyze your system's current state
against a database of known vulnerabilities,
and then generate a detailed report listing out all
of your vulnerabilities and their criticality level.
Then your responsibility as a cybersecurity professional
becomes one of prioritizing those vulnerabilities,
patching your systems, and mitigating those vulnerabilities
so that an attacker cannot exploit them.
Now, second, we have application security.
Application security is used
to safeguard our software from being
manipulated during its lifecycle.
At its core application security techniques are going to be
used to ensure that any custom software
that our organization develops is going to be
free of vulnerabilities within its code base.
To do this, we perform static analysis, dynamic analysis,
and package monitoring of our custom applications.
Now, a static analysis is going to be used
to analyze an application source code without actually
running or executing that source code.
Static analysis techniques are used
to spot potential vulnerabilities inside of your code base,
and this can be performed using a manual review
where you read each and every line of the source code,
and then look for potential vulnerabilities.
Or you can do this by using automated tools
to automatically analyze the source code
or a compiled binary to identify any insecure coding
practices that may have been used by your developers.
Now, a dynamic analysis on the other hand,
is going to evaluate an application as it's being run
to determine if there are any vulnerabilities inside
of that application.
Dynamic analysis tools like the OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite,
or the Peach Fuzzing tools can be used
to interact with the application in real time
by emulating a potential attack vector against
the application and then determining if it would be
vulnerable to that specific type of attack.
Now, the final technique we need to talk about
that's used in application security
is known as package monitoring.
Package monitoring ensures that the libraries
and components that your application depends on
are secure and up to date.
Now there are many tools available
to conduct package monitoring, including things like Snyk
and Dependabot, which are used to continuously scan
your application's dependencies and then alert
your developers to any known vulnerabilities
that may exist inside of those dependencies
so they'll be able to mitigate those
before an attacker discovers them and exploits them.
Third, we have penetration testing.
Now, penetration testing, also known as pen testing,
is used to simulate a real world attack on a system
to evaluate its security posture.
When you examine your pen test results,
you're going to be looking through the report to understand
how the penetration testers were able to infiltrate
or exploit your systems because an attacker is likely to use
similar attack vectors and exploitation techniques too.
Then as a cybersecurity professional, your role is going to be
to mitigate these issues that were identified
during the penetration test as part of that report,
so that way penetration testers
and future potential attackers will be unable to exploit
your systems using those same methods again in the future.
Fourth, we have system and process audits.
Now, system and process audits are a process
that involves conducting a comprehensive review
of your information systems,
security policies and procedures.
These audits help to ensure that your organization adheres
to the security best practices
and relevant industry standards.
When it comes to identifying vulnerabilities,
you should usually use a four step process of planning,
testing, implementing, and auditing.
During your first step, we need to conduct planning.
Now, planning entails laying down your policies, procedures,
and mechanisms to systematically track
and evaluate vulnerabilities inside of your systems.
Effective planning will include determining
how you're going to test and deploy fixes on your systems too.
During your second step, we need to conduct testing.
Now, testing involves evaluating patches
and updates in a controlled environment
before you conduct a broad deployment
across the entire enterprise network.
By conducting testing, we can ensure that the solutions
we're using to mitigate vulnerabilities
are not creating any new vulnerabilities, issues,
or problems for our systems.
During our third step, we need to conduct implementation.
Now, implementation involves deploying these patches
across the necessary devices and applications.
Whether it's a small network with a few devices
or a large enterprise network of thousands of endpoints,
implementing the updates is going to be a crucial step
for you that you have to perform in order
to mitigate the vulnerabilities that you identified
during your scans and your auditing process.
And then we go into our fourth step,
and this is where we need to conduct auditing.
Now, auditing ensures that the security patches
and configuration changes needed to mitigate
those identified vulnerabilities have actually
been implemented effectively,
and you can verify that there are no issues
that have been identified after you completed
your implementation step.
So remember, identifying vulnerabilities is the systematic
practice of spotting and categorizing weaknesses
in a system, network, or application
that could potentially be exploited.
Identifying the vulnerabilities in your systems is critical
so that we can increase the security of our systems
to prevent unauthorized access
and maintain the integrity
of our organization's systems and data.
There are many methods used to identify vulnerabilities,
including vulnerability scanning,
application security techniques, penetration testing
and security and process auditing.
By identifying vulnerabilities
and mitigating them, we can increase the level
of security in our organization, maintain higher levels
of uptime, and ensure
that the organization stays resilient in the face
of potential cyber threats.