VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT WHITEPAPER
Automating Vulnerability Assessment
This paper describes how enterprises can more effectively assess and manage network vulnerabilities and reduce costs related to meeting regulatory requirements. Automated Vulnerability Assessment / Vulnerability Management (VA/VM) solutions are supplementing and in some cases replacing manual penetration testing with an overall improvement in network security without increasing costs. New advances have eliminated the high management overhead and false positive rate issues that plagued open source and early market VA/VM entries.

This whitepaper discusses:
Speed of change in networks, equipment and applications plus the speed of exploit deployment is revealing weakness in corporate policies specifying relatively infrequent manual penetration testing. Perimeter defences (anti-virus, firewall and IPS/IDS) are vital, but can be bypassed by determined effort to reach and exploit known vulnerabilities that reside just inside the fence. The introduction of an automated network scanning mechanism and consolidated reporting to identify and track mitigation of known vulnerabilities is establishing a higher overall security level often using already existing budget and manpower.

Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................................... 3 The Challenges of Network Security Assessments ....................................................................................... 4 Protection of the Organisation’s Assets ..................................................................................................... 4 The Organisation’s Security Team............................................................................................................. 5 Regulatory Compliance