Question & Answer: Discuss the importance of the two steps below from a vulnerability management program. Are they necessary? If so, why?…..

Human lives are hugely intertwined with web. It makes people smart, connected and updated at lightening speed. But there are organizations and individuals who for their personal motives target web in various ways. They attack others systems to steal, make changes or completely destroy in an anonymous way. These type of attacks are termed as cyber attacks. Cyber attacks have become quite prevalent and dangerous these days. They hamper the growth of economy and functioning of large organizations and countries.

According to a study by McAfee, MyDoom is a spam-mailing malware that caused the largest economic damage of all time, it’s estimated damage is about $38 billion. Alarmingly, a report by security company AV-Test tells the total number of malware has doubled over the past four years. Thus, vulnerability management is necessary to understand about the multiple solutions that cause security breaches.

Common Peripheral Solutions are:

1. Having firewall which has network access control at entrance of network.
2. Antivirus software inside PC.
3. Intrusion detection and prevension system has set of pre-defined rules for disallowing bad packets.

Internal Solutions:

1. Vulnerability assessment like port scan, network scan,network map and IP Scanner is used in detecting weakness and assests of network.
2. Vulnerability management involves in assessing the network then prioritize according to the weakness discovered. It is used for addressing the most important issue first.

Thus vulnerability management is very important for addressing really important issues. Let us consider a house where you automatic alarm system but not all the doors closed. Thus, vulnerability management makes a difference to all the peripheral solutions like:

1. Like fixing vulerabilities of firewall. Thus, preventing data loss.
2. Improving intrusion detection system.
3. Antivirus detects the incoming packets but not the system. Thus, vulnerability management is used for addressing all these issues.