Why routine vulnerability scanning is a necessity
Many organizations have realized the need to scan their web applications for vulnerabilities but not all have implemented a holistic and integrated
application security program. Some still depend on sporadic security scans, hoping that these will be sufficient to secure their applications. While such testing can certainly help to find and close some of the gaps that attackers can exploit, it is not a long-term solution. To go from reactive to proactive web application security, routine vulnerability scanning is a must to give an
up-to-date picture of your web security posture and deliver the data that you need to decide what to remediate and when.
The benefits of automating web application security
With systematic vulnerability scanning in place, you will be faced with a list of vulnerabilities found by the scanner(s) in your application environments. In an enterprise setting with hundreds of websites and applications, this list could easily run to thousands of issues – so what do you do next?
Let’s start with the unpleasant truth that unless your scanner has accurate automatic confirmation capabilities (such as Invicti’s
Proof Based Scanning), your list of vulnerabilities is likely to contain
false positives. In that case, manual verification would need to be step one. After weeding out the false positives, you need to triage, assign, and fix the identified vulnerabilities. When a fix is ready, you need to retest it to make sure that it works and has remediated the vulnerability. Without the right tools and automation, all these steps are error-prone and time-consuming even on a smaller scale. At an enterprise level, doing it all manually may simply be impossible.
Advanced automated security solutions like Invicti help you effectively deal with vulnerabilities by accurately automating everything than can be automated. With a wide array of integrations, Invicti can deliver accurate scan results directly into the collaboration and management tools that your teams already use. This includes two-way issue tracker integrations to automatically trigger rescans for submitted fixes.
Managing vulnerabilities centrally
While Invicti has its own easy-to-use vulnerability management dashboard, you may want to combine its scan results with data from other security solutions. This is especially common in large organizations that aggregate multiple sources of vulnerability intelligence in a centralized management platform. To support this usage, Invicti provides out-of-the-box integrations with several vulnerability management tools, including
ServiceNow Vulnerability Response,
Kenna, and
DefectDojo.
Developed by the
Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP),
DefectDojo is an open-source application security vulnerability management tool that streamlines the application security testing process. DefectDojo helps you merge similar findings into one result to deal with it effectively. Apart from improving vulnerability remediation, it also offers features such as report generation and security metrics.
Integrating Invicti with DefectDojo
To benefit from these capabilities, you can easily integrate Invicti with DefectDojo. To set up the integration, simply enter the required information in the
Server URL,
Access Token, and
Engagement ID fields in Invicti. You can then test the integration between Invicti and DefectDojo to ensure that vulnerabilities are correctly exported to DefectDojo.
To automate the vulnerability remediation process, you also need to create a
notification in Invicti for the
Scan Completed event and select DefectDojo as its endpoint. Invicti will then automatically export all the vulnerabilities it identifies to DefectDojo. See this
step-by-step guide for detailed information on integrating Invicti with DefectDojo.
Whatever your workflow, start with reliable data
Invicti offers
dozens of out-of-the-box integrations, including DefectDojo, to help you automate the vulnerability remediation process. But whatever your specific workflows and requirements, you need to start by ensuring that you are only automating reliable results and not feeding false positives into your pipeline. That way, you can start fixing real vulnerabilities without wasting valuable time on manual verification or chasing false alarms. Especially at an enterprise level, accurate automation is the only approach to securing ever-growing application environments. Invicti, with its Proof-Based Scanning technology backed by decades of security research, delivers
reliable data for vulnerability management and remediation.
