Vulnerability Assessment
The objective of a vulnerability assessment is to probe and analyze the infrastructure or application in question and provide a prioritized list of discovered vulnerabilities with prioritized risk-rated recommendations to solve the security issues. A vulnerability assessment can simply be the results of an automated scan, or more comprehensive and trustworthy findings reported by a professional security engineer.
Regularly scheduled network vulnerability scanning can help an organization identify weaknesses in their network security before the bad guys can mount an attack. The goal of running a vulnerability scanner or conducting an external vulnerability assessments is to identify devices on your network that are open to known vulnerabilities without actually compromising your systems.
Conducting periodic vulnerability scans is the perfect complement to performing regular antivirus updates and applying the necessary security patches for any new critical vulnerability discovered. Periodic vulnerability scanning goes a long way to helping your organization make sure you discover and mitigate any weaknesses on your network before they can be exploited.