Vulnerability assessments may be broken down into one of two types: Outside looking in and inside looking around.

When performing an outside looking in vulnerability assessment, you are attempting to compromise your systems from the outside. Being external to your company provides you with the cracker's viewpoint. You see what a cracker sees — publicly-routable IP addresses, systems on your DMZ, external interfaces of your firewall, and more. DMZ stands for "demilitarized zone", which corresponds to a computer or small subnetwork that sits between a trusted internal network, such as a corporate private LAN, and an untrusted external network, such as the public Internet. Typically, the DMZ contains devices accessible to Internet traffic, such as Web (HTTP) servers, FTP servers, SMTP (e-mail) servers and DNS servers.

When you perform an inside looking around vulnerability assessment, you are somewhat at an advantage since you are internal and your status is elevated to trusted. This is the viewpoint you and your co-workers have once logged on to your systems. You see print servers, file servers, databases, and other resources.

There are striking distinctions between these two types of vulnerability assessments. Being internal to your company gives you elevated privileges more so than any outsider. Still today in most organizations, security is configured in such a manner as to keep intruders out. Very little is done to secure the internals of the organization (such as departmental firewalls, user-level access controls, authentication procedures for internal resources, and more). Typically, there are many more resources when looking around inside as most systems are internal to a company. Once you set yourself outside of the company, you immediately are given an untrusted status. The systems and resources available to you externally are usually very limited.

Consider the difference between vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. Think of a vulnerability assessment as the first step to a penetration test. The information gleaned from the assessment is used for testing. Whereas the assessment is undertaken to check for holes and potential vulnerabilities, the penetration testing actually attempts to exploit the findings.

Assessing network infrastructure is a dynamic process. Security, both information and physical, is dynamic. Performing an assessment shows an overview, which can turn up false positives and false negatives.

Security administrators are only as good as the tools they use and the knowledge they retain. Take any of the assessment tools currently available, run them against your system, and it is almost a guarantee that there are some false positives. Whether by program fault or user error, the result is the same. The tool may find vulnerabilities which in reality do not exist (false positive); or, even worse, the tool may not find vulnerabilities that actually do exist (false negative).

Now that the difference between a vulnerability assessment and a penetration test is defined, take the findings of the assessment and review them carefully before conducting a penetration test as part of your new best practices approach.

The following list examines some of the benefits to performing vulnerability assessments.