There is a confusion between the two common yet important security concepts in information security; Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessment.
Penetration Testing is more about being the attacker who can breach the robust yet pregnable defense of the organization system. As for Vulnerability Assessment, this is a process of defining, identifying, classifying, and prioritizing existing vulnerabilities in the systems.
The key is also understanding that neither can replace the other. Securing the perimeter of your cyber defense system and improving your current defenses are complements to each other.
Vulnerability Assessment
A necessary yet comprehensive process that provides organizations with the knowledge, awareness, and risk background necessary to understand threats to their environment and react accordingly.
Key Benefits:
identifying known security exposures before attackers can exploit them
Better understanding of each an every device on the network weaknesses and purpose
Defining levels of risk that exists on the network
Penetration Testing
A goal-oriented test that involves ethical hackers simulating planned attacks against an organization’s security infrastructure to exploit security vulnerabilities that require patching. This purpose is to emulate how malicious hackers can gain unauthorized access through exploiting such loopholes and what assets will be compromised.
Key Benefits:
Reveal the exploitable vulnerabilities of a system — This shows the real risks that attackers could do in reality. Emulating attackers can also help to find out a vulnerability that is theoretically high risk but in reality, it is not that risky because of the difficulty of exploitation.
Putting the organisation’s cyber-defence capability to the test — Analysing the effectiveness of procedures, policies and response-time of the organisation.
Summary:
Vulnerability Assessment: Usually requested by organizations that require a helping hand in dealing with the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of their systems. The goal is to receive feedback, consultations and metrics filled with vulnerabilities in the environment so that vulnerabilities can be remediated.
Penetration Testing: Usually requested by organizations whose goal is to test their current defense and seek to improve it in preparation for unanticipated cyber attacks. The goal is to determine whether an existing security system can withstand an intrusion attempt from malicious attackers.
Conclusion
Business Systems exists to connect all of an organization’s intricate parts and interrelated steps to work together for the achievement of the business strategy. Which of the two aforementioned are more important? In our opinion, both are equally important as each serves different purposes and requirements of the organizations.