How to Launch and Perform Detailed Vulnerability Scans | Cyber Security

Vulnerability Management is a critical area of cybersecurity, or you can call information security as well.

Organizations have various IT Asset inventory at their disposal.

Typical IT Assets include:

1. Network Appliances – Routers, Switches, Firewalls
2. Softwares – CRM, ERP, Office 365, Sass Solutions etc
3. Operating systems – Windows, Linux, Mac OS
4. Content management systems

This is just a small example, depending on the size of organization, Assets vary, hence vulnerability management becomes a critical focus area of cybersecurity.

In this Article, I am writing and showing how you can perform a detailed vulnerability assessment or VM Scan to get bird’s eye view of Recommendations and Security Insights.

Vulnerability scans give you detailed results on weaknesses, remediation steps and also risk measures to mitigate and strengthen the security posture based on Vulnerability report.

How to Run Vulnerability Scan using Qualys Enterprise Platform

This is Qualys Enterprise Platform Dashboard where you have various functions available to perform.

Here, I am using the vulnerability scanner to perform scans for a particular IP Address, which an asset category labelled by me.

As you can see, above image showcases some highlights like:

1. Global Cyber Risk Score
2. Cloud Posture
3. External Attack Surface
4. Production PCI Assets

• To perform a Vulnerability Scan using Qualys, Navigate to the Scans Tab > Click on Manage Vulnerability Scans

• You have multiple options under the scan bar like:

1. Manage Vulnerability scans
2. Manage discovery scans
3. Configure Scan Settings
4. Configure Search Lists
5. Configure Scanner Applications
6. Configure Scan Schedules
7. Set Up Host Authentication

• Click on New > Scan

• You will enter for further configurations.

• This is an important area. You need to choose target hosts ( IP Addresses of Assets being assigned) . Internal IP’s used in the organization or you can use any sample IP to run VM Scan.

Here, I have used an IP of my earlier projects, so I am trying here with Qualys.

You have Options displayed:

1. General Information – Title, Option Profile, Processing Priority, Network, and Scanner Appliance
2. Choose Target Hosts from – Assets, Tags, Asset Groups, IPV4 Addresses ranges, Exclude IP’s
3. Notification – Get report directly at the email after the scan

Add > IP Address information > IPV4 Addresses Tab > Click Launch > To run scan

• As, it is a fresh Qualys deployment I have performed, there are no IP Database here, hence you first need to add the IP.

• Click on Add and Proceed.

• Click OK > To launch Scan

• Here, you will be displayed scan overview and information.

• You can close the bar and come back to qualys dashboard.

• This is Qualys Scan Dashboard.

• As you can see, our scan is being initiated and the status is in “Queued”

• Now, The Scan have been started and changed to Running Status.

• It will take some time to scan completely, till then you can explore qualys UI and functions. Scan runs in the background.

• To generate final report, it took me around 40 minutes.

• As you can see in the above picture, our Vulnerability scan is being completed and status is changed to finish.

• You can check the Vulnerability assessment in Qualys itself or you can export the report file in various formats:

1. PDF
2. DOCX

This is how simple it is to Run Vulnerability scans using cyber security solutions like Qualys.

You also have Tenable Nessus VM Solution which is again a popular solution to perform cyber vulnerability assessments.

I will also showcase vulnerability assessments using Nessus. Stay tuned and check out our other cyber installations and deployments series, will list down below.

Also Check out these Articles

1. Azure Sentinel SIEM Setup
2. Splunk SIEM Platfrom Overview

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