When it comes to vulnerability scanning, complexities have long made what might seem simple a complex, multi-layered endeavor. That doesn’t mean vulnerability scanning isn’t worthwhile or that it isn’t a foundational part of enterprise security. It just means that as IT environments evolve with ephemeral assets and cloud-native ecosystems, balancing security with efficiency must also evolve. We’ve already discussed container vulnerability scanning; this article takes a deeper look at vulnerability scanning more broadly so teams can get the most out of this common tool.
What is Vulnerability Scanning?
Vulnerability scanning is an automated process of identifying and reporting security weaknesses within a system, network, application, or infrastructure. Vulnerability scanning helps organizations patch security soft spots before attackers can exploit them.
How? Vulnerability scanning tools identify assets like servers, databases, and applications within a network, inspect them for known vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and outdated software versions, then generate a report of vulnerabilities for remediation.
Vulnerability scanning tools typically work using both the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) systems. They incorporate the enhanced details of the NVD, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores, to assign ranks to vulnerabilities’ severity.
Further, different types of scanning target different aspects of an organization’s IT infrastructure:
- Network vulnerability scanning
- Host-based vulnerability scanning
- Web application vulnerability scanning
- Database vulnerability scanning
- Cloud and container vulnerability scanning
- Port scanning
- Source code scanning
Vulnerability scans can also be classified based on methodology:
- Active scanning: Sending direct probes to systems
- Passive scanning: Monitoring network traffic without direct interaction for continuous scanning that doesn’t impact system performance
- Internal scanning: Focusing on systems inside the organization’s network perimeter
- External scanning: Assessing internet-facing systems and public-facing assets
- Authenticated scanning: Performing scans using valid user credentials
- Unauthenticated scanning: Simulating an external hacker’s perspective
While vulnerability scanning identifies weaknesses in order to safeguard digital assets, it comes with three core challenges:
1. False positives and negatives
False positives can add to vulnerability scanning noise, sending teams scrambling after vulnerabilities that aren’t real threats. And time spent investigating non-issues might delay response time for real threats. Conversely, false negatives are also challenging since undetected vulnerabilities can lead to breaches, especially if attackers exploit them before the next scan cycle.
2. Lack of contextual analysis
Even when scans surface accurate issues, scanners operate without knowing the true severity of the vulnerabilities they uncover. Though teams may get a CVSS score indicating the severity of the vulnerability, that severity doesn’t account for whether the vulnerability is in a critical asset, is exposed to the internet, or where it is located.
3. Difficulties working with complex environments
Modern IT environments can’t rely on periodic scans. After all, their ephemeral resources may escape a scanner’s scrutiny entirely, with containerized workloads that last for seconds and serverless functions triggered on demand.
Runtime and Container Scanning with Upwind
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What are the Benefits of Vulnerability Scanning?
Vulnerability scanning does more than identify security flaws, it plays an outsized part in reducing risk, improving operational efficiency, and strengthening resilience. And risks are considerable.
According to Amazon Web Services intelligence, every day, global threat monitoring systems observe over 100 million potential cyber threats, with around 500,000 confirmed as malicious.
With threats a constant and massive presence, vulnerability scanning has become a first line of defense to find and close gaps before attackers can exploit them. The right scanning approach can do more than detect risks — it can strengthen an organization’s entire security posture.
Here are the core benefits of vulnerability scanning:
Early Threat Discovery
Detecting vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them prevents costly breaches and reduces the impact of potential security incidents. But a core debate revolves around how to make it happen best.
- Active Scanning (Proactive): Actively probing systems can detect issues early, but it risks disrupting live environments with agents.
- Passive Scanning (Reactive): Observing network traffic and behavior reduces disruption but may miss dormant issues.
Modern platforms are blending both approaches using continuous, agentless monitoring (as through API integration) and an active sensor like eBPF for deeper runtime security.
Reduced Attack Surface
By uncovering unnecessary services, exposed ports, and outdated software, vulnerability scanning minimizes the number of entry points attackers can target. However, the question of how far to go is a point of debate.
- Breadth-Focused Scanning: Scanning every asset results in comprehensive coverage but, often, excessive noise.
- Risk-Based Scanning: Prioritizing high-value, exposed assets reduces alert overload but potentially misses some vulnerabilities.
Is there a balance? Yes, a comprehensive CNAPP might use agentless scanning to provide visibility across all assets, apply context-aware prioritization, and add eBPF-sensor monitoring for runtime visibility where critical workloads need it.
Risk Prioritization and Planning for Remediation
Effective scanning ranks vulnerabilities by business impact and contextual factors so teams can fix the most critical issues first. The challenge is how to prioritize meaningfully in large and complicated environments. Options include:
- CVSS-Based Scoring: Standardized scores offer consistency but lack real-world context, creating unmanageable alert volumes.
- Context-Aware Scoring: Weighing asset criticality and exploit likelihood requires complex data integration.
The severity of a vulnerability is meaningless without adding context-based intelligence. A more pressing and timely debate today is how simply data sources can be aggregated and integrated so organizations can get control, reduce manual analysis, and reduce noise.
Compliance and Regulatory Assurance
Regular scanning helps meet industry security standards to make audits easier, reduce fines, and build customer trust. However, the tension lies between compliance-driven vs. security-driven scanning.
- Compliance-Driven Scanning: Focusing only on passing audits can lead to a minimal-security mindset and missed risks.
- Security-Driven Scanning: Comprehensive coverage can overcomplicate operations.
Platforms should integrate with compliance protocols, make it simple to stay updated, and balance regulatory needs with solid security.
Continuous Security Improvement
Ongoing scans provide insight, which drives future security planning and investment. The goal is to improve an organization’s defensive posture over time, but sustaining improvements isn’t automatic.
- Scheduled Scans: Periodic scans risk missing fast-evolving threats between scans.
- Continuous Scanning: Up-to-date scans can lead to better security, but not if teams don’t use the insights they provide.
Continuous scanning ensures that vulnerabilities are detected instantly. They’re also a must-have in cloud environments where traditional scans can miss so much. Periodic scanning is often used for compliance and requires fewer resources. But for real-time protection in cloud environments, continuous scanning has become a security must.
Essentially, while vulnerability scanning offers critical security benefits, each advantage comes with technical and operational challenges. No single approach solves every issue. But comprehensive security platforms can help make balance a little easier. Here’s what that should look like:
| Benefit | Challenges | Platform Features |
| Early Threat Discovery | Disruptive scansIncomplete coverage | Blended agentless and runtime sensors like eBPF |
| Reduced Attack Surface | Excessive alertsMissed flaws | Asset discovery plus real-time risk scoring |
| Risk Prioritization | Data integrationAlert fatigue | Context-aware scoring driven by behavioral analysis and machine learning |
| Compliance Assurance | Minimum-security mindsetOvercomplex systems | Compliance made simple with automated enforcement |
| Continuous Security Improvement | Insights go unusedTeam fatigue | Real-time insights with automation features |
Beyond Basic Scanning: Advanced Detection Methods
While vulnerability scanning is often considered a foundational security practice, its role extends beyond identifying common misconfigurations and known CVEs. It plays a supporting role in addressing advanced threats such as zero-day vulnerabilities, supply chain attacks, and advanced persistent threats (APTs) by serving as a detection baseline and enforcement layer.
How can it help with advanced threats outside the narrow scope of known vulnerability detection? Let’s explore a few examples:
Zero-Day Attacks
Vulnerability scanning can’t help identify unknown vulnerabilities — they’re invisible to conventional scanners. But that doesn’t mean vulnerability scanning is useless in thor detection.
Vulnerability scanning supports a strong zero-day strategy in multiple ways: first, continuous scanning establishes baseline behaviors from systems, so when deviations happen, they can indicate potential zero-day exploitation. And integration with global threat feeds also helps prioritize assets most likely to be targeted by emerging zero-day exploits.
In the end, organizations get better visibility and deeper understanding of their systems. It’s knowledge that can be used to identify future zero-days faster, so responding is quicker, too.
Supply Chain Attacks
Another concern is modern software dependencies, which extend organizational vulnerabilities across a vast ecosystem (and an enlarged attack surface). A supply chain attack occurs when attackers compromise one of those third-party services. Are organizational resources at risk? It can be difficult to even get visibility into versions and resources in cloud dependencies.
Scanning development environments and container images for known vulnerabilities can help detect vulnerabilities pre-deployment for fewer issues later. Plus, Tools like SBOM explorers (Software Bill of Materials) map out an application’s entire dependency tree so teams can quickly identify vulnerable components when a new CVE is disclosed.
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
APTs are stealthy, involving well-funded attackers like state-sponsored hackers or cybercriminal groups. They operate over a long period of time to evade detection, banking on persistence to grant them access to valuable data while evading detection.
But vulnerability scanning continuously reduces the attack surface for APTs, making it harder to gain and maintain access. Continuous scanning can help eliminate seemingly small vulnerabilities that might be exploited by these elusive hackers, or that may be coupled together in chain attacks to grant access across systems.
Further, vulnerability scanning analyzes both infrastructure configurations and code to increase the chance an attack is caught early, before it can escalate. Attacks often start with infrastructure-level misconfigurations and escalate through code-level vulnerabilities, so scanning both increases the likelihood of detecting an issue early in the attack chain, preventing lateral movement and reducing damage.
While vulnerability scanning alone cannot prevent zero-day attacks or thwart APTs, it undergirds advanced threat detection. It reduces the attack surface, supports zero-day response, and secures the software supply chain. With scanning integrated into development pipelines and runtime environments, organizations can catch vulnerabilities before they become gateways to larger, more dangerous attacks.
Upwind Brings More Effective Vulnerability Scanning to Complex Ecosystems
Upwind’s vulnerability scanning integrates runtime intelligence to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities across virtual machines, containers, and serverless environments. By analyzing runtime data, Upwind reduces the noise of traditional vulnerability scanning by 95%, letting teams get down to business on important issues faster.
By combining cloud security posture management with runtime context and real-time protection, teams lose their alert fatigue. To learn more, schedule a demo.
FAQ
How do you define vulnerability?
A vulnerability is a weakness in an organization’s digital ecosystem. Vulnerabilities can include weaknesses like coding bugs, misconfigured firewalls, open ports, and weak default settings. They can also include human flaws, like vulnerability to phishing schemes.
Vulnerabilities can appear in:
- Hardware
- Networks
- Applications
- Software
- Processes
Like an unsecured laptop left in public, a vulnerability isn’t a problem until it’s exploited by a bad actor. A vulnerability itself simply has characteristics that allow misuse to happen: It’s exposed, it’s exploitable, and any exploitation will have an impact, from downtime to data loss.
What are the 3 types of vulnerability scanners?
The three primary types of vulnerability scanners are:
- Network-based: Securing the infrastructure
- Host-based: Securing endpoints and servers
- Web application-based: Securing web-facing and internal applications
These primary scanners focus on scanning different types of resources and together, they cover much of an organization’s IT infrastructure where vulnerabilities are most likely to exist. Typically, CNAPPs cover all 3 types of vulnerability scanning by connecting to cloud environments using API integrations and using runtime scanning with technology like eBPF sensors for deeper insights into hosts like cloud VMs, containers, and Kubernetes nodes.
What are the 5 steps of vulnerability management?
The five steps of the vulnerability management lifecycle are:
- Identification: Discovering and cataloging vulnerabilities
- Evaluation: Vulnerabilities are assessed in terms of their severity and potential impact.
- Prioritization: More severe vulnerabilities are slated for patching and remediation first.
- Remediation: Teams patch, alter configurations, or implement workarounds.
- Verification: Teams rescan the environment to make sure the vulnerability is resolved.
The steps are cyclical, as new vulnerabilities are constantly discovered, and identified vulnerability information is incorporated into CI/CD pipelines for continuous improvement.
