Vulnerability Assessment

Vulnerability assessment plays a major role in providing security to any organization’s resources and infrastructure from various internal and external threats. To secure a network, an administrator needs to perform patch management, install proper antivirus software, check configurations, solve known issues in third-party applications, and troubleshoot hardware with default configurations. All these activities together constitute vulnerability assessment. Network vulnerability scanning can be categorized into active scanning and passive scanning:

• Active Scanning: Interacts directly with the target network to find vulnerabilities by sending probes and specially crafted requests to the target host in the network
• Passive Scanning: Finds vulnerabilities without directly interacting with the target network and identifying vulnerabilities via information exposed by systems in their normal communications