Vulnerability Assessment And Penetration Testing

What Is Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing?

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) are two types of vulnerability testing. The tests have different strengths and are often combined to achieve a more complete vulnerability analysis. In short, Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessments perform two different tasks, usually with different results, within the same area of focus.

Vulnerability assessment tools discover which vulnerabilities are present, but they do not differentiate between flaws that can be exploited to cause damage and those that cannot. Vulnerability scanners alert companies to the preexisting flaws in their code and where they are located. Penetration tests attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities in a system to determine whether unauthorized access or other malicious activity is possible and identify which flaws pose a threat to the application. Penetration tests find exploitable flaws and measure the severity of each. A penetration test is meant to show how damaging a flaw could be in a real attack rather than find every flaw in a system. Together, penetration testing and vulnerability assessment tools provide a detailed picture of the flaws that exist in an application and the risks associated with those flaws.

Features and Benefits of VAPT

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) provides enterprises with a more comprehensive application evaluation than any single test alone. Using the Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) approach gives an organization a more detailed view of the threats facing its applications, enabling the business to better protect its systems and data from malicious attacks. Vulnerabilities can be found in applications from third-party vendors and internally made software, but most of these flaws are easily fixed once found. Using a VAPT provider enables IT security teams to focus on mitigating critical vulnerabilities while the VAPT provider continues to discover and classify vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing and Compliance Requirements

Compliance is a major undertaking, whether it is PCI, FISMA or any other. Veracode’s service allows companies to meet their compliance requirements faster and more effectively. The Veracode platform finds flaws that could damage or endanger applications in order to protect internal systems, sensitive customer data and company reputation. Having a system in place to test applications during development means that security is being built into the code rather than retroactively achieved through patches and expensive fixes.

How Veracode Accommodates VAPT

Veracode’s platform combines both Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) methods. By doing so, Veracode provides both a full list of the flaws found and a measurement of the risk posed by each flaw. Veracode performs both dynamic and static code analysis to not only find flaws in code but also to determine if there are any missing functionalities whose absence could lead to security breaches. For example, Veracode can determine whether sufficient encryption is employed and whether a piece of software contains any application backdoors through hard-coded user names or passwords. Veracode's binary scanning approach produces more accurate testing results using methodologies developed and continually refined by a team of world-class experts. Veracode returns fewer false positives, allowing penetration testers and developers to spend more time remediating problems and less time sifting through non-threats.

Veracode has developed an automated, on-demand, application security testing solution. With Veracode, companies no longer need to buy expensive vulnerability assessment software, train developers and QA personnel on how to use it, or spend time and money to constantly update it. The Veracode platform is dynamically updated and upgraded, meaning users reap the latest benefits every time they log in.