Vulnerabilities
While malware certainly presents an ongoing danger to your network, it is not the only concern of the security professional. In the following sections, I’ll cover some other issues.
Exploits vs. Vulnerabilities
A vulnerability is the absence of a countermeasure or a weakness in a countermeasure that is in place. Vulnerabilities can occur in software, hardware, or personnel. An example of a vulnerability is unrestricted access to a folder on a computer. Most organizations implement a vulnerability assessment to identify vulnerabilities.
An exploit occurs when a threat agent takes advantage of a vulnerability and uses it to advance an attack.
Unnecessary Running Services
Services that are not required to be running on a system should be disabled. Running services present an additional attack surface to the hacker. Once they identify the running services on a machine, they will research all the vulnerabilities presented by those services and attempt to use them...
