Spotting vulnerabilities takes many eyes

Vulnerabilities can take many forms, and you can’t expect to uncover them all unless you have a diverse portfolio of tools to help you in the hunt.

At my company, our vulnerability management program includes regular monitoring of security forums and vendor mailing lists for announced vulnerabilities, as well as an assortment of penetration testing and vulnerability assessments. We use a third-party service to do weekly scans and assessments of our outward-facing infrastructure in order to discover any new application or infrastructure vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting and ports that might have been opened after an application modification, for example. I use several third-party pen-testing firms because I figure that using just one could cause us to miss some of the techniques and mind-sets of attackers. I’d like to implement a bug bounty program with rewards paid out upon the discovery of vulnerabilities within our application, but the executive staff hasn’t signed off on that idea.

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