Over the past 15 years, vulnerability management has evolved from a simple process to a complex business practice. The increasing number of vulnerabilities, rising cyber-attacks, and software vulnerabilities as the leading cause of breaches have highlighted the limitations of open source vulnerability tools. While open-source tools have been effective to some extent, they come withs drawbacks. Organizations need to adapt to more advanced and comprehensive vulnerability management software to combat modern security challenges effectively.
In this blog, let us understand the limitations of open-source vulnerability scanners and advantages of dedicated vulnerability management tool.
Limitations of Free and Open-source Vulnerability Scanners
Here are the most common limitations of open-source vulnerability scanner tools and the problems associated with them:
1. No Dedicated Technical Support
Lack of timely and dedicated tech support is probably the biggest problem with any open-source vulnerability scanner. Open-source scanners are built mainly by developers and testers to develop proofs of concept or automate some of their tasks. So, these tools are popular among the community because they are free, and people instantly start using them out of curiosity.
But these developers/testers do not invest in providing dedicated technical support to their users. Users have to rely on communities to ask questions/problems or fix them themselves. In some cases, the tools even discontinue altogether. In addition, they struggle with numerous bugs and feature limitations making these tools less reliable in the long run. Also, you cannot afford to spend time trying to fix the tool when hundreds of vulnerabilities are lurking around in your IT environment.
2. Lack of Detection Comprehensiveness
Many free tools detect only specific vulnerabilities. They usually do not have access to a comprehensive vulnerability database that can detect many publicly disclosed vulnerabilities. Hence, they show a lot of false positives. Since they are not developed and tested with the best technology, some networks will have bugs and compatibility errors.
Furthermore, some tools support only one or a few platforms like Windows or Linux. To implement a vulnerability management scanner for all your devices, you might have to configure and maintain many other open-source scanners for your heterogeneous IT environment. Even though you might get away with no spending, you will lose a lot of time and resources making upgrades and maintaining custom code.
3. Need for Integrations for Basic Functions
Open-source vulnerability scanners can only go so far as to detect vulnerabilities in the network. But they don’t provide any assistance to execute the steps that follow after detection, such as vulnerability assessment, prioritization, patching, and more. Also, many security teams choose to manually integrate their open-source or sometimes even paid scanners with prioritization and patching tools to continue the workflow.
Besides, most organizations assume that integrations for vulnerability management scanners are a de facto standard because of these limited functions. Data from the vulnerability management scanner is fed into a patch management tool to execute the next steps of the vulnerability management program. In addition, setting up integrations increases development and maintenance costs. Instead of focusing on managing risks, teams spend more time integrating, managing and troubleshooting the tools.
Advantages of a Dedicated Vulnerability Management Tool
A commercial vulnerability management tool is built with a specific purpose in mind: to help detect a vulnerability and track it to mitigation in the most efficient way. Here are the advantages of a dedicated vulnerability management tool:
1. Dedicated Support, Good Scalability, and Intuitive design
A commercial vulnerability management tool provides dedicated technical support for you to resolve issues immediately since time is a crucial factor in vulnerability mitigation. Technical support specialists who know every corner of the tool would be ready to help you get back on track as soon as possible.
Commercial tools are designed for easy expansion and management. The tool comes with a graphical user interface to help you visually understand the exact security posture and make faster and better decisions. As your organization and the number of devices grow, onboarding new devices and handling more vulnerabilities will still be easy.
2. Comprehensive and Accurate Vulnerability Detection
A dedicated vulnerability management tool is more comprehensive in the number of platforms and devices it supports. All risks across your environment are shown in one unified view. With a better idea of your risks, you can derive actionable insights and act on them immediately.
A commercial provider of vulnerability management tools leverages an up-to-date vulnerability database with all the latest security intelligence. The scanner will detect all the latest vulnerabilities when they are disclosed for the first time in public. You can feel safe knowing that the tool reflects an accurate security posture and does not give you a false sense of security.
3. Core Functionalities to Strengthen the Vulnerability Management Process
After a vulnerability detection, it needs to be remediated by patching hand-in-hand. In-built patching capabilities in commercial tools simplify and speed up risk mitigation. Instead of feeding the data into another tool, or worse, manually downloading and deploying the patches in each device, you can readily deploy the patches from the same instrument.
Compliance is a core part of a vulnerability management program. Industry and organizational security standards mandate that devices are under periodic scans for vulnerabilities and remediates effectively. Commercial vulnerability management scanner can detect and display compliant and non-compliant devices. You can readily generate reports for compliance audits easily.
4. Additional Features for Practical Advantage
After the detection of vulnerabilities, the next stage is to assess the risks and prioritize the order of remediation. In many cases, IT admins prioritize the vulnerabilities manually based on CVSS scores and exploitation activity. A well-built commercial vulnerability management tool takes care of this task for them.
It can prioritize all the vulnerabilities based on their CVSS scores and multiple other factors. IT admins can be innovative in their remediation process by first mitigating critical vulnerabilities and averting security breaches.
SanerNow Advance Vulnerability Management Platform is Here!
An ideal vulnerability management tool should let you focus on fighting vulnerabilities and not the tool itself. You should be able to handle the entire workflow starting from detection to mitigation from just one tool.
SanerNow Advance Vulnerability Management is a unified cloud-based tool to handle all your vulnerability management program stages, from scanning to patch deployment. You can:
- Perform continuous and periodic scans over all endpoints and network devices in under 5 minutes
- Leverage our homegrown, world’s most significant vulnerability database with 170,000+ security checks
- Assess and prioritize vulnerabilities based on the exact risk levels to your environment
- Remediate the detected vulnerabilities with automated and integrated patching
If you’d like to know more about SanerNow, register for a free demo. We will show you how to strengthen your security posture with a unified and improved vulnerability management tool.