Vulnerability Assessment

PRIMARY CONTACT: Carl N. Kriebel CISSP

It is critical to assess the risks within your organization’s IT infrastructure. Despite an organization’s best efforts, IT systems are often released with bugs and installed with misconfigurations, or the underlying technology is changing so rapidly that it’s hard for system administrators to keep pace. Schneider Downs understands that the process for installing security updates can be confusing and time-consuming, and that, in reality, security updates can sometimes be overlooked.

The goal of the Vulnerability Assessment is to provide our clients with a comprehensive view of potential security flaws in their environment by looking for misconfigurations, unpatched services, open ports, and other architectural mistakes. The results of this assessment will be a detailed report of vulnerabilities uncovered during the assessment, ranked by criticality, along with an agreed-upon remediation plan with detailed steps to assist in remediating noted vulnerabilities that create a security risk.

Detailed Approach to a Vulnerability Assessment

We begin by identifying the scope of the assessment through mapping the client’s IP address ranges. This approach will help identify the active devices on the organization’s network. From here, a port scan will be performed on each of the active devices identified. This will determine which services are running on each active device and the associated ports. From the device discovery, we will scan each IP address with our automated security assessment tools to identify misconfigurations, vacant patches, and service vulnerabilities that may exist within the host. We will then analyze the results to eliminate any false positives that may have been identified and determine the actual threat and risk to the organization.

Our Vulnerability Assessment works in conjunction with our automated tools and the application of our industry experience. We determine the impact of potential security exposures and the risk they may or may not pose depending on your organization’s overall security posture and risk appetite.

Regardless of your organization’s size, Schneider Downs will work with you to determine the most effective approach when determining the scope of the assessment. Our team will work closely with you to analyze the results and take a collaborative approach in issue identification and building action plans to remediate identified vulnerabilities. We also consider any other security components and mitigating factors to determine the overall risk to the security posture of the organization’s IT infrastructure. We believe that it is essential to take this holistic strategic view during a vulnerability assessment to accurately identify the risk to the organization.

The results of our assessment will be a detailed report of vulnerabilities uncovered during the assessment, ranked by criticality, along with an agreed-upon remediation plan with detailed steps to assist in remediating the noted vulnerabilities.

Our Process

1. Identify the scope/IP address range
2. Port scan performed on each active device/IP
3. Automated security assessment performed on each active device/IP
4. Assess vulnerabilities considering mitgrating factors
5. Eliminate false positives
6. Produce detailed report