Favorite Intruder is a cloud-based vulnerability scanner that helps to find weaknesses in your online systems before the hackers do. It saves you time by proactively scanning for new threats as well as offering a unique threat interpretation system that makes vulnerability management easy. Nessus is one of the many vulnerability scanners used during vulnerability assessments and penetration testing engagements, including malicious attacks. This article will focus on this vulnerability scanner, discussing the fundamentals that one needs to have before getting started with the tool, the different scanning capabilities that it provides, what it takes to run the tool and how results.
The Main Types of Vulnerability Scans
Some of vulnerability scanning tools are comprehensive in their coverage, able to perform multiple types of scans across heterogeneous environments that include on-prem, Unix, Linux, Windows, cloud, off-site, and onsite. Other scanning tools serve particular niches, so it’s always critical to thoroughly explore your use cases before investing in a scanner.
Let’s now explore some different types of vulnerability scans, which each have their place, depending on your use cases.
Credentialed Scans Versus Non-Credentialed Scans
Credentialed and non-Credentialed scans (also respectively referred to as authenticated and non-authenticated scans) are the two main categories of vulnerability scanning.
Non-credentialed scans, as the name suggests, do not require credentials and do not get trusted access to the systems they are scanning. While they provide an outsider’s eye view of an environment, they tend to miss most vulnerabilities within a target environment. So, while they can provide some valuable insights to a potential attacker as well as to a security professional trying to gauge risk from the outside, non-credentialed scans give a very incomplete picture of vulnerability exposure.
On the other hand, credentialed scans require logging in with a given set of credentials. These authenticated scans are conducted with a trusted user’s eye view of the environment. Credentialed scans uncover many vulnerabilities that traditional (non-credentialed) scans might overlook. Because credentialed scans require privileged credentials to gain access for scanning, organizations should look to integrate an automated privileged password management tool with the vulnerability scanning tool, to ensure this process is streamlined and secure (such as by ensuring scan credentials do not grow stale).
Here are some other ways that scans may be categorized, based on use case.
Vulnerability Scanner For Home
These scans target the areas of your IT ecosystem that are exposed to the internet, or are otherwise not restricted to your internal users or systems. They can include websites, ports, services, networks, systems, and applications that need to be accessed by external users or customers.
These scan and target your internal corporate network. They can identify vulnerabilities that leave you susceptible to damage once a cyberattacker or piece of malware makes it to the inside. These scans allow you to harden and protect applications and systems that are not typically exposed by external scans.
These scans are based on the environment that your technology operates in. Specialized scans are available for multiple different technology deployments, including cloud-based, IoT devices, mobile devices, websites, and more.
Vulnerability Scanners List
Non-intrusive scans simply identify a vulnerability and report on it so you can fix it. Intrusive scans attempt to exploit a vulnerability when it is found. This can highlight the likely risk and impact of a vulnerability, but may also disrupt your operational systems and processes, and cause issues for your employees and customers — so use intrusive scanning with caution.