Vulnerability Assessment Overview

Organizations are constantly inundated with a stream of new information pertaining to software updates, patches, security advisories, and threat bulletins. Mature vulnerability management practices require significant time, attention, and resources to implement and maintain.

Unfortunately, attackers have access to the same resources as defenders and can exploit gaps between the disclosure and remediation of emergent threats. As a result, organizations that do not regularly scan for vulnerabilities, and proactively address them, face a significant likelihood of compromise.

Scaling enterprise vulnerability remediation efforts across varied and complex environments and prioritizing these actions against conflicting enterprise needs also presents a daunting challenge. URU delivers Vulnerability Assessments to help our clients address these issues, adopt a more proactive remediation stance, and satisfy necessary compliance requirements. 

Every assessment that we perform includes the following:

False positive removal

Ultimately, Vulnerability Assessments are the result of leveraging industry standard tools and techniques to identify known vulnerabilities. This process often results in a high false positive rate as scanning technology relies on signatures which must make assumptions regarding the security posture of the systems they assess. These tools default towards assuming a given security flaw is present when circumstances are unclear, which leads to the reporting of inaccurate results. Sorting through, and making sense of, these issues can be very difficult without the right expertise. URU has years of experience at efficiently and accurately identifying false positives and separating them from legitimate vulnerabilities.

Data aggregation

Vulnerability Assessments often generate large volumes of data which can be overwhelming to consume. After isolating false positives, URU organizes legitimate vulnerability data in a way that allows for efficient and detailed analysis, and provides an overview of all identified vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities that are common across multiple hosts and services are condensed into single findings with supplemental details to identify affected systems. Furthermore, vulnerabilities are organized into functional categories which allows for ease of remediation efforts and highlights larger systemic issues throughout enterprise environments.

Security analysis

Ideally, Vulnerability Assessments are just one piece of a larger enterprise security program, providing valuable intel regarding the current state of the systems assessed. This information can be used to identify larger problems which may be present, such as deficiencies in patch management, configuration standards, or overall system architecture. URU performs further security analysis on Vulnerability Assessment results in order to identify potential, high-level, root causes for the vulnerabilities that have been identified. Results of this type of analysis often have far-reaching implications beyond the individual systems assessed, and can inform and improve enterprise security posture as a whole.