Relationship Between Vulnerability Scanning and Malware Scanning

Earlier, there were only few scanners that used to scan for vulnerabilities or to scan for the malicious software in the system. Usually, anti-virus scanners are widely used in the IT world like the Intrusion Prevention system, reputation based check ups, virus scanners, sandboxing, etc. But after some time, vulnerability scanners came into the IT world that are aimed at scanning the vulnerabilities in the system. Both of the tools have different roles and responsibilities. Although the tools are different from each other, but these tools can act as a subset for each other. For e.g., vulnerability scanner can also look for the malware while searching for vulnerabilities in the system and security scanners may find vulnerabilities while looking for the malware in the system.

Malware scanning tools are usually set up to each host on the network and executed in a memory resident mode for capturing the activities that occur in the real-time. It can be both a weakness or a strength as a weakness is that more and more hosts have to be updated every time and the strength is that malware scanners contain many sensor points. Vulnerability scanning tools are always being deployed to meet with the compliance goals. The benefit of using this scanner is that one does not need to be active all the time for scanning, it is not necessary to deploy the scanner everywhere in the system, and it is not essential to scan everything.

Benefits of vulnerability scanning:

i) Scanning can be scheduled and it can be run automatically at scheduled time.

ii) Proper configuration does not cause any operational impact.

iii) It saves time by providing feedback on the efforts of remediation.