Vulnerability scanners can be a confusing topic. It seems like for anything related to cybersecurity, there’s a vulnerability scanning tool that promises to automatically find vulnerabilities—and nobody wants to be vulnerable, right? Add to this the overlaps between scanning and protection solutions and things get even more muddled. This post looks at the three main types of vulnerability scanning that are relevant for web application security, each corresponding to a different layer of modern app deployments.
Types of vulnerability scanners: A quick overview
The majority of business applications today are built using web technologies and deployed on cloud infrastructures, often using containerized components. Virtual network environments assembled from these ready-made pieces are the natural habitat of web apps. To cover each layer of the complex structure that makes up your overall attack surface, you need three main types of vulnerability scanners: application scanners, network scanners, and cloud security scanners.
Application security scanners (aka DAST tools)
Application scanners focus on the application layer, where valuable and sensitive data is most likely to be processed and stored. Probing the application layer for security weaknesses is the domain of dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools that can safely simulate real-life attacks to uncover vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and security misconfigurations. By actively testing public-facing websites, applications, and APIs, application scanners help you minimize risk all across your most exposed attack surface. When integrated into the software development lifecycle, they can identify runtime issues before they make it to production, and speed up mitigation and remediation when issues are found.
When talking about scanning applications, there can be some overlap and confusion between source code analysis and runtime scanning. Static application security testing (SAST) tools are used during development to check source code for insecure constructs, but they do not operate on the running application are generally not considered security scanners.
Network vulnerability scanners
Network scanners are what many IT people have in mind when talking about “a vulnerability scanner.” In the pre-cloud days of corporate servers and workstations running most of their software within on-premise network infrastructures, network scanning was the primary avenue of recon and attack for malicious actors trying to get a foothold in an organization’s network—and the main type of vulnerability scanning for penetration testing. While network vulnerability scanning is still important for things like identifying open ports and ensuring that firewall and network configurations follow best practices, in cloud-based deployments, most of it is handled by cloud service operators, making a network vulnerability scanner less essential for a typical cloud-focused organization.
Cloud security scanners
In a way, cloud infrastructures have taken over the traditional role of network infrastructures from those on-prem days. Cloud security scanners focus on identifying vulnerabilities that are specific to cloud environments, including misconfigurations, insecure APIs, and unprotected storage buckets. They are crucial for ensuring compliance with standards and protecting against data exposures and breaches stemming from attacks on cloud services, but—as with network scanning—most cloud providers include at least a basic level of cloud security scanning in their offerings. For many organizations, this makes a dedicated cloud security scanner a lower-priority tool.
Why are application vulnerability scanners important?
Web applications and APIs make up your outermost attack surface while also being subject to frequent changes that increase the risk of security gaps slipping into production. Application vulnerability scanners are thus essential tools for detecting security weaknesses across the multitude of websites, applications, and APIs operated by any sizable organization. By safely simulating the actions of attackers, these scanners (also called DAST tools) can identify many common vulnerability classes, allowing you to fix security gaps before they can be exploited by attackers and turn into data breaches or worse.
Some vulnerabilities can be found by multiple types of vulnerability scanners, leading to the misconception that scanning a site or application with a network scanner is a useful security step. In reality, other scanner types can only find a handful of application security issues compared to a dedicated application vulnerability scanner. For example, a network scanner may scan a website and flag problems with a vulnerable web server version or insecure header settings, but that’s only a tiny fraction of the attack surface and potential security issues.
A high-quality DAST tool will find all the issues a network scanner would report while also performing a wide range of passive and active checks. This lets you find not only misconfigurations and known vulnerable components (CVEs) but also security weaknesses specific to your application as tested, like XSS, SQL injection, CSRF, and more. Advanced application vulnerability scanners come with their own vulnerability databases and can also perform automated authentication to access and test APIs and restricted pages that a superficial scan would never even see. Leading DAST solutions can also be integrated into the development lifecycle to help development and security teams identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities before they make it into production.
Common challenges in application vulnerability scanning
The complexity of application environments combined with the growing intensity and impact of cyberattacks that target web application vulnerabilities requires application scanners that can do far more than any vulnerability scanner could even dream of just a decade ago. Ensuring comprehensive application security testing comes with its own set of challenges that need to be overcome to make a realistic difference to an organization’s security posture.
Maximizing scan coverage and accuracy
Accurately testing as much of the application as possible is likely the biggest technical challenge for automated vulnerability scanning today. Modern business applications and APIs are often built and deployed in a continuous development pipeline that encompasses not only new first-party code (which is typically a minority of the code base) but also open-source components, external dependencies, and framework code. Apps also tend to be highly dynamic and frequently require authentication to prevent unauthorized access, leaving legacy scanners that can’t run credentialed scans powerless to find anything but the most superficial vulnerabilities during their unauthenticated scans.
Managing false positives
False positives are a challenge for any automated testing but can be especially harmful in vulnerability scanning. Scanners need to balance finding as many real vulnerabilities as possible (avoiding false negatives) with minimizing false alarms, which can be extremely difficult to automate without advanced enterprise-grade features like Invicti’s proof-based scanning. Legacy vulnerability scanners were originally designed to aid in manual penetration testing and thus tend to generate a high proportion of false positives to avoid missing potential vulnerabilities.
Integrating with development lifecycles
Running an external vulnerability assessment every now and again is not nearly enough to keep up with the pace of application development. Just as integrating SAST tools into the pipeline is now standard engineering practice, it is also critical to build an application scanner (a DAST tool) into the development lifecycle. On the condition that your selected scanner generates high-quality and actionable reports, automation and integration with popular issue trackers and CI/CD tools help to proactively run dynamic security testing as early as possible while also cutting down response and remediation time for issues detected in production.
Getting measurable security improvements
Building application security tools into your workflows often runs into problems when it comes to demonstrating time to value. Merely running an external vulnerability scan and throwing the results at your developers seldom translates into quick and effective fixes, especially if those results include false positives that waste everyone’s time and can lead to bad blood between your devs and security engineers. On the other hand, a good DAST tool with in-depth integration can allow for a mostly hands-off process where informative and actionable reports from the tool go directly to developers, making security flaws just another type of bug that’s fixed routinely and effectively.
The place of application scanners in your cybersecurity program
Of the three main types of vulnerability scanners, DAST tools are the only type that your cloud provider won’t run for you. They are also uniquely positioned to both test your real-life attack surface (when used for external scans) and make your development practices more secure through internal scans in the pipeline. As such, they fill several vital roles in your overall cybersecurity strategy and program:
- Identifying and addressing security flaws: The primary function of application scanners is obviously to identify security vulnerabilities in web applications, providing a near real-time security assessment and helping with ongoing risk management efforts. To be effective in this role, vulnerability scans should ideally be run automatically on a schedule, with the results fed into your vulnerability management system.
- Supporting security teams with accurate data: Security teams use many tools to build a picture of the current security posture and prioritize remediation efforts. Advanced application scanners can provide confirmed reports of identified vulnerabilities along with an initial estimate of their severity and potential impact, helping security engineers prioritize mitigation and optimize overall security processes.
- Improving application security in the long run: Implementing reactive fixes based on scan results is the most obvious aspect of remediation, but avoiding new vulnerabilities in the future is even more valuable. When you have an accurate application scanner that provides developers with full technical details and remediation guidance while also retesting committed fixes to ensure they are effective, devs can address the root causes of security vulnerabilities and avoid similar bugs in the future.
- Ensuring regulatory and organizational compliance: As the only type of vulnerability scanner that can cover the whole application attack surface, a DAST tool can be invaluable for compliance efforts, whether you’re pursuing an industry standard like HIPAA or PCI DSS, an international security standard like ISO27001, or internal compliance requirements. Many standards explicitly list vulnerability scanning as a requirement but don’t specify the exact type of scanner to use, so picking a good quality tool makes the difference between checking a box and maintaining a strong security posture.
Conclusion: Application vulnerability scanning is your proactive defense
Application security scanners are the cornerstone of modern cybersecurity strategies. By detecting security flaws both during operations and in development while also enabling effective remediation, DAST tools play a critical role in protecting web applications and the sensitive data they harbor. When combined with network and cloud security scanners, they provide a comprehensive view of your risk level against a wide range of cyber threats.
However, unlike network or cloud vulnerability scanners, which are often part of a cloud provider’s offering, selecting and using application vulnerability scanning tools is something each organization needs to do on its own. DAST tools vary widely in terms of quality and feature sets, so getting the tool that’s right for you and integrating it into both your operation security processes and your development lifecycle can transform your entire cybersecurity game.
Quite simply, modern application scanners let you take a proactive approach to mitigate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by bad actors, ensuring a more resilient IT environment overall.
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