Comparison of Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing

Abstract

Business using internet has grown drastically in past decade. Attacks on web application have increased. Web application security is a big challenge for any organizations as result of increasing attacks. There exist different approaches to mitigate various security risks are defensive coding, hardening (Firewall), Monitoring and auditing. These solutions found more towards prevention of attacks or of monitoring types of. Vulnerability assessment and Penetration testing are two approaches widely used by organizations to assess web application security. Both solutions are different and complimentary to each other. In this paper comparison of these two approaches are provided. The authors found that penetration testing is better compare to vulnerability assessment as it exploits the vulnerability, while vulnerability assessment is superior in terms of coverage over penetration testing. General Terms Vulnerability Measurement, Penetration Testing