Vulnerability Identification

Vulnerability Identification

Vulnerability Identification is vital to proactively protect your IT system rather than reactively cleaning up after an attack. The vulnerability identification process enables you to identify and understand weaknesses in your system, underlying infrastructure, support systems, and major applications. It allows you to analyze the potential exposures generated by your supply chain and your business partners.

When vulnerabilities remain unidentified, attackers can use them to damage your applications, produce a deniable service, or create the circumstances for a breach. Attackers manipulate vulnerabilities to exfiltrate confidential and proprietary data that are vital to your business operations and to your professional reputation.

At Ward IT Security Group, we approach vulnerability identification from the analytical perspective of a potential attacker. Our team has the expertise to evaluate mission-critical applications hosted by our clients. We implement proactive protections by identifying weaknesses and opportunities before an attacker has an opportunity to exploit them.

IT Applications

Public-facing web applications are one of the primary threat factors by which attackers can infiltrate your organization’s IT system. The Ward Group has extensive experience in evaluating, assessing, and providing remediation recommendations for the spectrum of web applications. We have provided critical security assessments for applications hosting or providing portals for such highly attractive targets as health insurance exchanges, business and personal tax information, and primary eligibility management portals for state governments.

Our IT experts are meticulous when evaluating your organization’s applications. We bring to each security task a thorough understanding of applications, how they are attached and constructed, and how platforms are configured. We recognize that the inherent weaknesses built into many deployed applications are due to the development process and the tools used to produce them.

Cloud Systems

When your organization operates applications and stores data in a cloud system, your security concerns are similar to traditional IT systems only more complex. You retain accountability for system operations, data privacy, regulatory compliance, user authentication, access, and authority, yet these and other aspects of system security are often out of your direct control. Evaluating and assessing vulnerabilities can present procedural and technical difficulties.

At Ward Group, we understand the inherent challenges of cloud computing security. We analyze your exposures by assessing both the client side and the cloud side for compliance with required guidelines and standards. Our team reviews legal and regulatory issues and determines the extent of existing and missing safeguards. We evaluate your ability to access information related to privacy enforcement, data protection, security incidents, and other cloud environment factors that may be of your control.

Network Security

Unexposed vulnerabilities in your network provide attackers with easy access to your IT system. Ward Group works proactively to reveal existing network vulnerabilities before they become a problem. We dissect network traffic flows, analyze network device configuration, and evaluate the design and allocation of address space within the access controls to critical network subnets. Our team complies with standards and guidelines for public cloud computing as outlined in NIST Special Publication 800-144.

Physical Security

Ward has performed comprehensive independent physical and environmental assessments of some of the most critical data center sites in the Northeast. Our evaluation methodology is modular and ensures compliance with multiple regulatory environments and physical site variations. In evaluating your data center’s physical security risks, we provide you with the assurance that all control capabilities impacting compliance will be thoroughly investigated, evaluated, and documented.

Our experts work directly on-site with your organization management, IT team, and support staff. We use a collaborative methodology which guarantees a transparent end effective knowledge transfer process to your staff.

Supply Chain Security

Sources of supply chain risk can vary from third-party vendors, compromised software or hardware, embedded malware, or a wide variety of other origins. IT security best practices recognize that any systems evaluation should be based on breach inevitability, considering not if your system will be breached but when.

When the Ward Group evaluates and assesses your supply chain risk, we address aspects of data breach mitigation as well as prevention. Our team considers all potential sources of supply chain risk. We then work with your organization to establish security controls, identify vulnerabilities and security issues, and address vendor access concerns.

Policy and Procedures

Policies and procedures are an important element of the vulnerability identification process. Once security issues have been detected and remediated, it’s imperative to establish a written plan to manage the risk, prevent future problems, and monitor for ongoing compliance.

The Ward Group has the experience and integrity to review and upgrade your existing IT security policies and procedures. We can identify and assess policy weaknesses which may have allowed vulnerabilities to exist unabated. Our team works collaboratively with your staff to implement policies and procedures that address your vulnerabilities and system security requirements.

We review your physical security, IT policies, and procedures. When we discover system vulnerabilities we verify them with evidence and artifacts. We report vulnerabilities with assigned threat levels that allow you to prioritize remediation solutions based on risk.

Our Collaborative Approach

Ward Consulting is a small group of dedicated American professionals. We are best-of-breed specialists who shun canned big-business solutions and value working as a team. Together, we developed a collaborative approach that includes your IT management and business process owners on our evaluation team. We believe information is critical to any IT assessment. That’s why we begin each evaluation by working to understand your business processes.

Our team doesn’t perform audits that simply assign a pass/fail grade. Any IT system evaluation we perform includes a significant knowledge transfer from us to your organization. When we present our findings, we provide evidence and NIST references. If we uncover any threats, we rate them in a way that allows you to choose remediation alternatives based on critical need.