A contemporary approach to network vulnerability assessment

Abstract

Modern network vulnerability assessment tools suffer from an “information overload” problem Vulnerability assessment tools, traditionally, amass a monumental amount of flaws. A continuously growing number of vulnerabilities means that the tools need to be constantly updated. This means that the number of vulnerabilities appears overwhelming. Also, not all of these flaws are of significance to security. Host-based patch management systems bring a coherence to the chaos. The clear advantages of using these tools question the value of traditional vulnerability assessment tools. Andrew Stewart describes the advantages of using patch management technologies to gather vulnerability data. He proposes a lightweight method for network vulnerability assessment, which does not rely on signatures, or suffer from information overload.