thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Security Operations · Foundational

Vulnerability Scanning

Automated testing of systems and applications to identify known vulnerabilities, missing patches and misconfigurations.

Definition

Scanners such as Tenable Nessus, Qualys, Rapid7 InsightVM and OpenVAS compare discovered software versions and configurations against vulnerability databases. Scans can be credentialed or non-credentialed, internal or external, agent-based or network-based. Results require validation to remove false positives.

Example

A weekly Nessus scan of the server VLAN reporting missing OpenSSL patches.

Exam tip

Scanning is non-intrusive identification; penetration testing actively exploits.

Related terms