Week 2: Vulnerability Management Activities and Vulnerability Assessment Tools.

This week's reading material covered various topics like Service Level Agreements (SLA), vulnerability scanning tools, Common Vulnerability Scoring Systems (CVSS), and vulnerability feeds. In addition, there are various other topics discussed in the chapter reading that are just as important and play an essential role in the cybersecurity analyzing process as the four main discussion topics.

As a cybersecurity analyst, you should never always expect to be hundred percent on point all the time because there is no hundred percent right or wrong, especially in the computer networking infrastructure. However, this doesn't mean that as a cybersecurity analyst, you shouldn't give it all the effort you know you are capable of. We live in an information age that requires us to adapt to the content of transformation occurrences.

As I stated in my discussion post, we live in a comparative world, and private security companies, or any companies, must be upfront with their customers (clients) if they want to succeed in the information age. That is where the Service Level Agreement (SLA) plays a vital role between the companies and their customers. SLA transpired more often in IT than in other business industries. An SLA is a contract that can exist within a company (say, between a business unit and the IT staff) or between the organization and an outside provider (Chapman & Maymi, 2021).

Many scanning tools are available these days for protecting, preventing, and monitoring network activities. One primary purpose for scanning a network "is to get more details about the target network or device by poking around and taking note of the target's responses." The list of some scanning methods used in this process are:

• Port Scanning – is a computer program designed specifically for probing a host (workstation, etc.) or, for that matter, a server to determine which networking ports are available (open).
• Web App Vulnerability Scanning – unlike port scanning, this is an automated tool that can be used specifically for scanning web applications to check for vulnerabilities.

There are many other scanning tools available that are just as important as the two I have listed, and searching the web will provide you with a list of those other tools. The term "vulnerability feed" is something that you will want to take very securely as a cybersecurity analyst. There are different vulnerability feed cycles that vary depending on the network infrastructure functionality. The updated cycle or process can range from an hour to weeks depending on the situation, and "through they eventually tend to converge on the vast majority of known vulnerabilities." There will be a situation where you may have one feed cycle that shows a "threat significantly before another." The bottom line is that, with vulnerability feed, you have the options of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly cycles. Moreover, it is a plus for having the capability of noticing and responding immediately to a vulnerability.

 

 

 

Reference:

Chapman, Brent; Maymi, Fernando. CompTIA CySA+ Cybersecurity Analyst Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Second Edition (Exam CS0-002) (p. 63, 81). McGraw Hill LLC. Kindle Edition. Retrieved: June 21, 2023.