Penetration Testing vs. Vulnerability Assessment―Which is Best For You?

It is essential to assess your company's security to mitigate cyber attacks or security inefficiencies. But how do you evaluate your company's state of security? Penetration tests and vulnerability assessments are a great way to maintain and enhance your secure environment. 

We understand this is an overwhelming decision for many businesses to make. But which one do you need? Many clients ask questions such as, "Are they both going to do the same job? If not, which one is most important? Do I need them both?" 

At Usherwood, we understand your confusion and frustration. As a managed service provider, MSP, we must know what each of these evaluations entails. This helps us ensure that our clients pay attention to an assessment or test that could mitigate their risk.

What is Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing is when you hire an outsourced cybersecurity firm to use the same tools and techniques as a hacker-in-the-wild. Penetration testing helps to identify vulnerabilities before a malicious actor can exploit them. 

Another term for this type of hacker is an ethical hacker. The ethical hacker's goal is to test every possible way to get into your company's network, using approaches that a real hacker might use. During a penetration test, the ethical hacker will be given a certain amount of time to find access points to your network. 

An unbiased third party must perform the penetration test that can give you tested feedback on your company's risk of a data breach. Once complete, they will debrief with your company to explain where and how they could bypass your system security. This is a risk-free way to simulate what might happen if a real hacker tries to get in. 

Penetration testing is a proactive approach to improving your security year after year and threat after threat. It is a great way to test your current cybersecurity tools and enhance them based on your penetration assessment. The test will follow up with critical, high, medium, or low recommendations. This is a great way to ensure that your business is aware of any vulnerabilities that could open the door to a potential data breach. 

Weaknesses Typically Discovered From a Penetration Test

Infrastructure Level Vulnerabilities

• Your password isn’t strong enough or reused too often
• Having outdated software and applications
• Your network is misconfigured
  

Application Level Vulnerabilities

• SQL Injection flaws
• Authorization, encryption, and authentication flaws 
  

What is a Vulnerability Assessment? 

Network vulnerabilities are loopholes in hardware, software, or process. These loopholes can put your network at risk of stolen or leaked sensitive data. Companies have several vulnerabilities that they aren't even aware of. Many vulnerabilities stem from weak passwords, poor security tools, insufficient network monitoring, or unsecured backup methods.

Vulnerability assessments are generally quicker and less expensive to do. It's less costly because it is faster. Vulnerability assessments utilize software technology both externally and internally. An internal vulnerability assessment is performed by leveraging software to scan the network.

Flaws in software, however, can quickly be taken advantage of. There could be an operating patch missing on a computer or a server. There could be an issue with an old browser or Adobe.

It could also be how the networking is configured using old legacy protocols or existing settings and methodologies that shouldn't be in place on a computer network today.

Inner scanning devices would be placed into your IT environment to evaluate any network issues. Whatever the problem, the scan will identify internal threats to your company. It'll give you information about your company's security hygiene, and you will receive a rating. The rating will determine how severe the risk is associated with the vulnerability– low, medium, high, or critical. 

A vulnerability assessment also looks into the external assets, including the cabling and connectivity of applications or systems. These are physically checked to ensure everything is up to par.  An exchange server is also an excellent example of an external asset. Around twenty years ago, on-premise exchange servers were the pretty commonly used hardware. 

While they are not common anymore, a lot of companies over the last few years have been compromised because they had open ports to the outside world. There were vulnerabilities that hackers were taking advantage of to take over and manipulate environments. A vulnerability assessment will pinpoint any issues or weaknesses in the assessed hardware. This will give your business a clear sense of what needs to be reconfigured or changed. 

Weaknesses Typically Discovered From a Vulnerability Assessment

Performance Inefficiencies  

• Is your network running slow? 
• Are you noticing network crashes? 

Security Issues and Blind Spots 

• A flaw in your network that could lead to a breach
• Sensitive information that isn't secure enough
• Too many users with admin access 

Network Infrastructure Design Issues  

• Install network monitoring
• Embed security

Server and Storage Status 

• Identify why your servers are slow
• Get rid of unnecessary data that is taking up storage.

Vulnerability assessments give you a precise analysis of any risks that internal threats could cause. A vulnerability assessment will inform you of inefficiencies so that you can have them resolved before it is too late. 

Which Should My Company Use?

Are you trying to decide which test or assessment your business should receive, penetration or vulnerability? This is a very challenging decision. Although they both have a similar goal of mitigating risk, the approaches to recognizing threats differ. 

When you hire a managed service provider, they will offer different assessments of their services. For example, some will provide vulnerability assessments, and others will provide you with vulnerability and penetration assessments on your IT environment. This is why it's critical to understand the different reviews and which is most vital for your business.

Managed service providers try to maintain a proactive approach; performing a vulnerability assessment or penetration test is effective. At Usherwood, we offer vulnerability assessments to secure our client's environment. This is an excellent first step for your business if you have never received a vulnerability assessment.

It is a great way to gauge where your IT needs improvement. You would quickly reveal access points during a penetration test if you have never received a vulnerability assessment. 

You also need to train your users based on the outcome of these assessments. Teach users not to do certain problematic things and that their vulnerability may evolve. Penetration testing companies typically suggest getting assessed every few years. A different set of eyes, ideas, and methodologies, especially over time, can change things.

Some organizations would instead not do either assessment and pray they don't get targeted. We see industries nowadays enforcing these assessments as a requirement. Cybersecurity insurance companies are now looking at how often companies do vulnerability or penetration assessments.

Rather than avoiding them altogether or trying to choose between the two, it's more about choosing which one comes first. 

We recommend vulnerability assessments at least once a month to maintain a secure environment. Once your domain has done all it can to mitigate vulnerabilities, a penetration test would be an excellent way to test and reveal your environment's security. Some industries require one or both of these every year.

For larger organizations, it's recommended to perform a penetration test every year. The timing of these assessments depends upon the IT organization's maturity overall. 

This order of assessment will be quicker and generally less expensive in the long haul, but it also gives a good idea of what's happening and what kind of vulnerabilities you're exposed to. 

The Pros and Cons

Although you can’t really go wrong with either option, let’s summarize the pros and cons of both penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.

Penetration Testing Pros

• Third-party backup system
• Unbiased, risk-free testing
• Tests and enhances cybersecurity tools
• Predicts potential future breaches
• Only recommended annually

Penetration Testing Cons

• Tends to be more pricey
• Not as widely available

Vulnerability Assessment Pros

• Generally quick
• Less expensive
• Security hygiene assessed
• Service widely offered
• Internal and External threats assessed
  

Vulnerability Assessment Cons

• Recommended once a month
• Pricey in the long run
• May not be as efficient singularly

Ready to Secure Your Business IT Environment?

It may not be fun or easy to repeatedly test your company for the possibility of getting cyberattacked. Still, it's safer for your business to assume you will get hit. Everyone should be prepared for what can happen, whether they've been compromised before or not. 

There will always be a new vulnerability. They keep repairing themselves and evolving. By implementing vulnerability and penetration assessments, you know you're minimizing vulnerabilities and maintaining strong controls in other aspects of IT as well. You're educating yourself. There's so much to the IT space for an organization. In the end, somebody's account could get compromised, and there are ways to ensure that doesn't happen.

The number one priority of managed service providers is to maintain a secure environment. We offer vulnerability assessments to our clients during a network assessment. Although that doesn't mean we find penetration testing any less valuable. 

Recommending extra security precautions outside their services, such as penetration testing, helps clients utilize all available resources to maintain security. For that reason, we will break down each assessment so that your business can make an educated decision on the method(s) that will best suit your needs.  

Vulnerability assessments are part of our Odyssey Discovery process. Usherwood supports clients throughout the Northeast and guides them through all the does and don'ts of this process. While we do not perform penetration tests, we engage with penetration testing companies on behalf of our clients, ensuring we walk them through that process and help the best we can.

There are so many techniques that hackers can use to infiltrate your network. The more proactive you are with finding them, the less likely they will find them first. The more assertive approaches you can have to mitigate risks for a company, the better. To learn more about keeping your business secure, check out this article: 5 Reasons Your Business Is at Risk of Cyber Attacks.