When people misunderstand the differences between penetration testing and vulnerability scans, they are often missing a vital component in their overall network security profile and both are crucial for cybercrime prevention.

What is a Vulnerability Assessment?

A vulnerability assessment is the process of finding and measuring the severity of vulnerabilities in a system. Vulnerability assessments yield lists of vulnerabilities, often prioritized by severity and/or business criticality.

Vulnerability assessments typically involve the use of automated testing tools such as web and network security scanners, whose results are typically assessed, and escalated to development and operations teams. In other words, vulnerability assessments involve in-depth evaluation of a security posture designed to uncover weaknesses and recommending appropriate remediation or mitigation to remove or reduce risk.

Any changes to the equipment should immediately be followed by another vulnerability scan. The scan will detect issues such as missing patches and outdated protocols, certificates, and services.

What is a Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing, is typically a goal oriented exercise. A pentest has less to do with uncovering vulnerabilities, and is rather more focused on simulating a real-life attack, testing defenses and mapping-out paths a real attacker could take to fulfil a real-world goal. In other words, a penetration test is usually about how an attacker is able to breach defenses and less about specific vulnerabilities.

Penetration testing, like vulnerability assessment, also typically involves the use of automated vulnerability scanners and other manual pentest tools to find vulnerabilities in web applications and network infrastructure. Penetration tests do not need to be conducted as often as vulnerability scans but should be repeated on a regular basis.

Penetration tests are best conducted by a third-party vendor rather than internal staff to provide an objective view of the network environment and avoid conflicts of interest. Various tools are used in a penetration test, but the effectiveness of this type of test relies on the tester. The tester should have a breadth and depth of experience in information technology, preferably in the organization’s area of business; an ability to think abstractly and attempt to anticipate threat actor behaviors; the focus to be thorough and comprehensive; and a willingness to show how and why an organization’s environment could be compromised.

To such an extent, the fundamental difference between vulnerability assessment and penetration testing is the former being list-oriented and the latter being goal-oriented.

Conclusion

Both vulnerability scanning and penetration testing can feed into the cyber risk analysis process and help to determine controls best suited for the business, department or a practice. They all must work together to reduce cybersecurity risk. It is very important to know the difference; each is important and has different purposes and outcomes.

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