Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing
Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) are two types of vulnerability testing. The tests have different strengths and are often combined to achieve a more complete vulnerability analysis. In short, Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessments perform two different tasks, usually with different results, within the same area of focus.
Vulnerability assessment tools discover which vulnerabilities are present, but they do not differentiate between flaws that can be exploited to cause damage and those that cannot. Vulnerability scanners alert companies to the preexisting flaws in their code and where they are located. Penetration tests attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities in a system to determine whether unauthorized access or other malicious activity is possible and identify which flaws pose a threat to the application. Penetration tests find exploitable flaws and measure the severity of each. A penetration test is meant to show how damaging a flaw could be in a real attack rather than find every flaw in a system. Together, penetration testing and vulnerability assessment tools provide a detailed picture of the flaws that exist in an application and the risks associated with those flaws.
Features and Benefits
Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) provides enterprises with a more comprehensive application evaluation than any single test alone. Using the Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) approach gives an organization a more detailed view of the threats facing its applications, enabling the business to better protect its systems and data from malicious attacks. Vulnerabilities can be found in applications from third-party vendors and internally made software, but most of these flaws are easily fixed once found. Using a VAPT provider enables IT security teams to focus on mitigating critical vulnerabilities while the VAPT provider continues to discover and classify vulnerabilities.