VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT
Fidem’s continuous Vulnerability Assessment services systematically map and analyze the entire architectural and application attack surface. We provide IT infrastructures with prioritized remediation plans to neutralize critical entry points immediately.
DETECT, PREVENT, PROTECT.
The Vulnerability Assessment, part of the Defensio ecosystem, identifies and evaluates IT vulnerabilities with structured analysis and detailed reports. Thanks to advanced methodologies and specialized tools, we offer targeted preventive measures to protect sensitive data, improve technological resilience and ensure regulatory compliance.
Why run a vulnerability assessment.
Cyber threats evolve quickly. A regular vulnerability assessment finds weak points and allows effective countermeasures, preventing potential attacks. Prevention is fundamental to reduce operational risk and stay competitive, protecting critical resources and data.
What are the benefits of a Vulnerability Assessment?
Proactively identifying vulnerabilities lets you fix them before they are exploited, improving IT security and protecting sensitive data. This approach reduces the cost of cyber incidents, strengthens the trust of customers and partners and shows a concrete commitment to protecting company resources.
What do we detect?
- Device vulnerabilities: outdated or vulnerable software and firmware, privilege escalation, default or weak credentials, exposed ports and services.
- Misconfigurations: weak encryption, insecure HTTP methods, missing security headers, directory browsing, information disclosure.
- Code execution: traversal attacks, remote code execution, various types of code injection, cross-site scripting.
- Attack exposure: Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), Denial of Service (DoS).
- Software vulnerabilities: outdated or vulnerable components and libraries.
How does it work?
- In-depth analysis: more than 180,000 vulnerability tests are run, with both passive and active scans such as brute force attacks.
- Threat intelligence: our systems update in real time, ensuring constant protection against recent threats and targeted attacks.
“We want to know how exposed we are”: where to start
The question almost always comes like this, not with the technical name of the service but with a doubt: how attackable are we, and from where. The service that answers it is called vulnerability assessment: you look at what the company exposes to the Internet and to its own internal network, check which flaws can really be exploited and put in order of risk what has to be closed.
The sentences people come to us with, and what they mean
- “A customer is asking whether we are secure”: you need a report you can show to third parties, not just a technical list.
- “We don’t even know what we have online”: it is the most common case, and it starts from an inventory of what is reachable.
- “We have old servers nobody touches”: those are usually exactly the entry point.
- “We want to find the holes before someone else does”: exactly, and it is why it has to be repeated over time, not done once.
Scan, assessment, penetration test: not synonyms
A scan is automatic and lists potential vulnerabilities. An assessment verifies them, removes false positives and orders them by real risk. A penetration test proves which ones are really exploitable and how far you can get. Whoever sells a scan calling it a penetration test is selling the first thing at the price of the third.
Definitions in the glossary.
Where we run it
The external perimeter assessment is carried out entirely remotely, so the client’s location changes nothing: we work across Italy and Europe. For the internal part, network, segmentation and non-exposed systems, network access is needed, which we arrange remotely through a probe or on site.
Vulnerability Assessment: What the Service Includes
A vulnerability assessment is the systematic review of the weaknesses present on systems, applications and exposed services. It is not a single scan: it is a cycle that finds the vulnerabilities, establishes their real severity in your context and indicates the order in which to act.
The activity covers the external perimeter, everything reachable from the Internet, often wider than the company remembers, and the internal network, where you measure how far someone who already has a foot inside could get.
The scope includes exposed servers and services, web applications, network devices and firewalls, workstations, cloud systems and connected third-party services.
Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing: the Difference
They are two distinct activities and are often confused, with consequences for the quote and for expectations.
A vulnerability assessment searches in breadth: it identifies known vulnerabilities across the whole perimeter, in a repeatable way, and answers the question “which weaknesses do I have and which are the most serious”.
A penetration test searches in depth: it simulates a real attack on a narrow target and answers the question “can these weaknesses really be exploited, and how far can you get”.
In practice the first comes before the second. Running a penetration test on a perimeter that has never been assessed means paying for an expensive activity to discover problems that a systematic assessment would have found earlier and for less.
How the Assessment Is Carried Out
Scope definition. Which addresses, domains and systems are included, and which time windows to respect so as not to interfere with operations.
Discovery. Reconnaissance of what is actually exposed. It is the phase that produces the most surprises: forgotten services, reachable test environments, devices installed years ago and never decommissioned.
Detection and verification. Identification of vulnerabilities and manual verification of the results, to remove the false positives that make a purely automated report unusable.
Classification by real risk. Theoretical severity is not enough: a critical vulnerability on an isolated system can matter less than a medium one on an exposed service connected to data.
The Report and Remediation
The report is split into two parts because it has two readers. A summary for management, stating the overall exposure and what changes if nothing is done. A technical detail section for those who have to work on the systems, with evidence, references and precise fixing guidance.
Vulnerabilities are ordered by intervention priority, not by abstract score. Afterwards, the closure check confirms that the fixes applied really eliminated the problem, a step that is often skipped and is the only way to know whether the work paid off.
How Often to Repeat the Assessment
An assessment takes a snapshot of a moment. The perimeter, however, changes constantly: services are added, applications are published, new vulnerabilities come out for software already installed.
For most organizations a quarterly cycle on the external perimeter and an annual one on the internal perimeter is a reasonable compromise, with additional checks after every significant change in the infrastructure.
Where continuity is needed, monitoring becomes permanent through the managed SOC, which observes exposure over time instead of taking a snapshot.
How Much a Vulnerability Assessment Costs
The cost depends on the breadth of the scope: how many addresses and applications, only the external perimeter or the internal network too, one-off or recurring cycle. That is why we do not publish a single price list: the external perimeter of a small business and a multi-site network are different jobs.
The quote is immediate if you give us the approximate number of systems and domains to assess when you contact us.
Sectors and organizations we work with
The service is delivered across Italy and Europe. Assessment activities are carried out remotely, with on-site work where the internal perimeter or the client’s policies require it.
We regularly work with clients across Italy and, on request, in other European countries.
Related offensive security activities: penetration testing · Wi-Fi network security testing · red teaming · VAPT: vulnerability assessment and penetration testing
Continuous vulnerability scanning with Defensio
Fidem’s professional assessment takes a snapshot of the situation at a precise moment. Between one assessment and the next, Defensio continuous vulnerability scanning scans the perimeter exposed on the Internet every day, with public pricing from 59 euros a month and reports ready for audits, customers and insurers. For the internal network, the Defensio Sensor passive network probe runs the vulnerability assessment from the inside, without agents.
Definitions: vulnerability assessment · remediation in the cybersecurity glossary.