Feature Spotlight: Network Scanning

May 9, 2022

As part of securityprogram.io we offer network vulnerability scanning. Most standards (eg. PCI) require that you do at least quarterly vulnerability scanning. Vulnerability scanning is important for identifying resources on your networks and figuring out that they may have holes that an attacker could exploit.

Vulnerability scanning is a pretty basic activity that every organization with any internet facing systems should have in place. That is why we include it in SPIO. Otherwise, clients have to go find a scanning vendor and spend who knows how much extra time and money getting it in place.

What Makes A Great Scanner?

Our founder, Matt Konda, spent 4 years building a PCI ASV certified vulnerability scanner. Excellent scanning products on the market are differentiated by effective signature mechanisms, sophisticated reports, false positive management, integrated endpoint agents/management and low time to signature for newly released CVE's.

The more you integrate vulnerability management, the more sophisticated the workflows and management features are. Some scanners do more checks and fuzzing around web applications versus just network level checks. So in some cases, having a great scanner is worth it.

The problem is, in most all cases, the scanning is pretty dumb. It is just checking for open ports on a host, reading the banner and using something like a regular expression (regex) to extract a version number and then comparing it to a database of known vulnerabilities. In other words, at its core, the technology isn't that sophisticated.

SPIO Scanning Features

The features we include around scanning are focused around the core nuts and bolts of the offering. To make the offering robust and as up to date as possible, we leverage a widely used open source vulnerability scanning tool. As it turns out, this can be tricky to set up and optimize - so our customers find it nice that they don't have to worry about it.

As an SPIO user, you can manage your environments (what should be scanned) in the application. You can then view recent reports, which are provided in PDF and csv format for easier handling. We keep track of past reports so that you can always show that you've done your quarterly scanning duties.

Maybe one of the most important related features is that our team will help you identify which issues are real and need to be addressed. Vulnerability scanners are notorious for creating a lot of false positive findings. Sifting the real issues from the mass of common findings takes experience in the form of a trained eye. What this looks like to our customers is that we set up the initial environments (we can even help you do DNS discovery and the like to identify scan targets) then each quarter clients get items escalated that require attention.

Let Us Assist You!

In the Assisted Tier of SPIO, our team helps you understand the scan results! This ensures that your team is able to understand and effectively fix the real issues. It also means you don't waste your time on false positives!

We tried to make our vuln scanning as simple and pragmatic as possible. Whether you have us help you, or you do it yourself, the tools are right there for you in securityprogram.io.

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