Vulnerability Management Tools and solutions are used by security analysts for discovering security flaws in networks, and cloud environments, and applying relevant fixes. Many IT departments aren’t even aware of hidden threats in infrastructures and using the latest Vulnerability Management Tools can help perform audits and conduct effective security assessments. There are many tools for Vulnerability Management available for enterprises of all sizes but the best ones proactively identify, mitigate, and even detect future threats.
In this blog, we explained what vulnerability management is and give you a list of the top Vulnerability Management Tools used by the industry for the best performance.
Table of Contents
- What is Vulnerability Management?
- What are Vulnerability Management Tools?
- How do Vulnerability Management Tools Work?
- Best Vulnerability Management Tools in 2024
- How to Select the Best Vulnerability Management Tool?
- Conclusion
What is Vulnerability Management?
Vulnerability Management is the process of embarking on continuous and real-time threat discovery, risk prioritization, and resolution of critical issues in an organization’s IT infrastructure and cloud deployments. Security vulnerabilities are common weaknesses or flaws that impact the functions of networks and assets and common vulnerabilities can range from firewall misconfigurations, credentials leakages, unauthorized data access, and other types. Many new vulnerabilities are being discovered as we speak and attacks are getting sophisticated with their techniques.
Vulnerability Management Platforms are designed to improve the security posture of organizations and automate the process of threat remediation. Enterprises are using different Vulnerability Management Tools these days to defend against cyber attacks and protect their resources.
What are Vulnerability Management Tools?
Vulnerability Management Tools are software solutions designed to scan organization infrastructures for various vulnerabilities and recommend appropriate measures to remediate them. They can address critical security gaps, scan for weaknesses, and uncover all possible exploits in networks.
The top vulnerability management tools in the industry are PingSafe, Qualys, Metasploit, and OpenVAS and developers are working on incorporating the best features in upcoming releases. Enterprises can prevent unforeseen data breaches, and ransomware attacks, and protect other users in their organization by using the best vulnerability management software for remote monitoring and security management.
How do Vulnerability Management Tools Work?
Vulnerability Management Tools proactive scan for vulnerabilities in enterprises and identify unknown assets that need to be protected. The scope for security gaps and misconfigurations in assets and provide suggestions for remediating these flaws. It is important to use vulnerability management tools since these solutions help enterprises effectively stay one step ahead of adversaries. Vulnerability management solutions can reduce the burden of security staff by managing workloads and automating incident response and planning to a certain degree.
Best Vulnerability Management Tools in 2024
The ability to analyze an organization’s security posture and take steps to improve it is the hallmark of effective vulnerability management. Modern vulnerability management solutions can reduce risk and pinpoint areas of improvement, which can normally be exploited by hackers to cause data breaches.
Below is our complete Vulnerability Management Tools list for 2024.
#1. PingSafe
PingSafe is one of the leading Vulnerability Management Tools and comes with a comprehensive cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). It offers complete Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), and can detect over 800+ types of secrets in real-time across Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, and many more. PingSafe performs zero-day vulnerability assessments and can do agentless VM snapshot scanning. It identifies cloud resources and assets with known CVEs and has an Offensive Security Engine that generates graph-based visualizations of detected misconfigurations for immediate threat remediation.
Features
- Supports Infrastructure as Code templates such as those of CloudFormation, Helm, Terraform, and Kubernetes
- Detects embedded secrets in container images, and vulnerabilities in hosts, and provide CI/CD integration support for container security
- Monitors domain names, verifies and validates secrets, and offers real-time detection of cloud credentials leakages like IAM keys, service accounts, and Cloud SQL.
#2. OpenVAS
OpenVAS is one of the most popular vulnerability management tools in the market and it is primarily designed for enterprises and agencies. It offers end-to-end vulnerability management, risk prioritization, asset discovery and tagging, and risk management – all on one platform. The deployment is cloud-based and it supports major platforms like Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, web app, and others.
Features
- Web scanning and vulnerability assessments
- Daily updates
- Authenticated and unauthenticated testing
#3. Metasploit
Metasploit uses security tools, libraries, and exploits to conduct penetration tests and helps organizations review security from the perspective of attackers. It allows users to configure payloads, integrates with different threat reconnaissance platforms like Nmap and SNMP, and is considered one of the world’s best open-source vulnerability management tools. There are modular and extensible security features embedded with it and these can be changed according to user preferences.
Features
- Automated penetration testing
- Reporting and analytics
- Issue tracking
- Command-line tools
#4. Detectify
Detectify works as an online security scanner and provides a 99.7% accuracy rate for conducted vulnerability assessments. It enhances security operations and is powered by AI to assist with External Attack Surface Management (EASM). Analysts can rely on it as one of the leading vulnerability management tools and it can uncover exploits for internet-facing applications as well.
Features
- Continuous and automated threat discovery
- Simple configurations and tech stack fingerprinting
- Advanced crawling and application scanning
- Domain verification, attack surface policies, and custom modules
#5. Sqlmap
Sqlmap detects injection flaws and is one of the top open-source vulnerability management tools. It works on all operating systems and offers support for a wide variety of DBMS. Sqlmap can also establish TCP connections between database servers and testing machines.
Features
- Automated SQL injection attack detection and database errors prevention
- Supports a wide range of DBMS solutions such as Apache Derby, Amazon Redshift, IRIS, Ralma Database Manager, Virtuoso, and others
- Enumerates user account privileges, password hashes, roles, tables, and more
#6. Tenable
Tenable helps enterprises gain increased visibility across modern attack surfaces and focuses efforts on protecting assets. It’s one of the best vulnerability management tools in the industry and produces risk-based views and real-time continuous assessments. By prioritizing threats and assigning risk levels, organizations can better understand more about their exposures and proactively implement effective remediations.
Features
- Discovers hidden vulnerabilities and uncovers unknown assets in environments
- Categories threats automate prioritization and apply quick patches
- Real-time data visualizations, tracking, threat intelligence, integrations, and remediation
#7. Qualys
Qualys is one of the best vulnerability management tools worldwide and has made a name for itself in the industry. It helps businesses simplify security IT operations, reduce compliance costs, and offers the full spectrum of auditing tools for optimal protection. Qualys can secure network perimeter systems, internal networks, web applications, and much more.
Features
- Policy compliance and secure configuration assessments
- Vulnerability management dashboards
- Remediation prioritization
- Asset inventory management and risk management
#8. Burp Suite
Burp Suite automatically deploys custom HTTP sequence requests and modifies HTTP messages to match and replace rules for requests. It finds out hidden HTML exploits, captures results in customized tables, and filters and annotates them for effective security improvement. Burp Suite is also capable of authenticated scanning, and API scanning, and can remediate a variety of bugs effectively, making it one of the best vulnerability management tools in the industry.
Features
- Secures HTTPS traffic and reissues WebSocket messages
- Recon data management and DOM XSS vulnerability prevention
- Token strength assessments
- Hidden attack surface discovery
#9. Nikto
Nikto is one of the most popular open-source web vulnerability management tools, and web application scanners, and can run comprehensive security tests for effective audits. It can identify over 6700 types of dangerous programs and can do version-specific checks.
Features
- Detects XSS vulnerabilities, SQL injection attacks, and other types of cyber threats
- Offers SSL support and can fetch content from web servers
- Credentials authorization checks
- Template engine, customizable reports, and Metasploit exports
#10. Nessus
Nessus is a professional vulnerability scanner that is used by more than 1 million users around the world. It is one of the top vulnerability management tools and offers complete vulnerability coverage for configuration auditing, malware and botnets, virtualization and cloud, and web applications. Nessus is popular for its high scanning speeds, and accuracy, and has the world’s largest library of configuration and vulnerability checks.
Features
- Minimizes attack surfaces and reduces total cost of business ownership
- Regularly updated, scalable, and satisfies the widest range of regulatory and compliance standards
- Offers RESTful API support, risk scores, malware detection, and targeted threat remediation
How to Select the Best Vulnerability Management Tool?
Here are some important features you should wish to evaluate to choose the best vulnerability management tool for your organization:
1. Regular updates – Good vulnerability management solutions provide timely updates and improve threat detection quality with every release. Vulnerability management tools should include coverage for all major operating systems, infrastructure components, and applications in environments. There should also be support for a variety of cloud services and the solution should be capable of detecting misconfigurations in these environments.
2. Compliance management – Compliance checks are an important part of security assessments and modern vulnerability management tools should be capable of conducting them. If your vulnerability management software can ensure adherence to the latest regulatory standards and frameworks like PCI-DSS, NIST, HIPAA, and others, it is reliable then.
3. Pricing and features – Not crossing budgets and finding the right blend of features for the right pricing is an important aspect of purchasing a vulnerability management tool’s subscription. You want features that are best suited for your organization and do not end up with unwanted ones. The best way to find out which solution is right for you is to try out different products by signing up for free trial periods before investing.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that security is an ongoing process and no solution is perfect. However, using the best vulnerability tools can increase your chances of preventing data breaches. As long as your systems are patched, you get regular updates and address pressing security gaps and issues, your organization will stay protected. The type of Vulnerability Management tool you use will depend on your business requirements and vision, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some organizations prefer using a combination of vulnerability management solutions for these reasons and keep trying out features until they find a platform that’s right for them.
Please let us know your thoughts on the Vulnerability Management Tools in the comments!
