What is a vulnerability test?
A vulnerability test is a process of checking security risks within a software system. The weakness or flaws in a system’s security design and implementation is known as vulnerability.
Why does a software application need a vulnerability test?
Hackers are more active than ever and nobody wants to get their personal information stolen or end up with a suddenly corrupted application. This kind of consequence has a negative impact on the organization. To protect a software application from an unpredicted cyber-attack, every application is integrated with a patch of security.
Office 365 is one of the most widely used cloud application packages that has over 150 million active commercial users. Cybercriminals are always trying to devise malware infiltration techniques to surpass the built-in security of the application. Now, a significant and widely used application like Office 365 needs an internal security design that is dependable. To make the security design dependable to users over the world, vulnerability tests are done.
How Office 365 vulnerability test is conducted?
These are the subtopics that you need to understand to know how Office 365 vulnerability test is conducted:-
Vulnerability management and security monitoring:
Microsoft maintains the security in their services by the Assume Breach logic. Assume Breach limits the authorization placed in applications, services, identities, and networks. All of these are labeled as insecure and already compromised. In this way, Microsoft limits the impact of security vulnerabilities by reducing the chances of damage. The vulnerability management program is designed to continuously validate the security status of the environment to detect, prevent and rectify any vulnerabilities to prevent its exploitation.
A highly secure system can also be compromised. To battle it, security monitoring is done extensively and continuously. This allows rapid detection and hence security threats are responded at the right time. This is a part of the Office 365 vulnerability test that uses cloud-based automated tools to sense and respond to security threats. Potential security threats detected through scanning are conveyed to the Microsoft 365 Security Response team and the process of response is followed.
Machine state scanning:
The security posture of a system is bound to degrade over time. Some of the reasons are unpatched machines, sudden changes in configuration, and security code regressions. To prevent the software from malfunctioning, automation services are deployed that continually assess our systems for this kind of loopholes and inform us.
Machine state scanning is sometimes also called PAVC. PAVC stands for Patching, Anti-malware, Vulnerability scanning, and Configuration scanning. Office 365 uses machine state scanning to ensure the machine are up to date with the latest patches and their base configurations correctly align with relevant frameworks.
Patch management and anti-malware:
Patch management battles vulnerabilities by ensuring Office 365 systems are updated timely when new security patches are released. The security patches are prioritized according to the level of risk. The Security team is in charge of analyzing the available security patches to decide their level of risk in the context of production environments. The security patches are given severity scores according to the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
Anti-malware is the second element of PAVC. Office 365 uses capable anti-malware software to protect its services against viruses. A full anti-malware scan is done at every endpoint at least weekly. Additional scans are conducted on the files that are downloaded. These scans use known malware signatures to find malware and prevent its execution. The anti-malware program of Office 365 downloads the latest malware signatures to give the software the best possible immunity.
Vulnerability and configuration scanning
The security agent installed during deployment allows full automatic vulnerability and configuration scanning of the production environment. The scan results are collected in a central storage service. Automated reporting is enabled to make these results available to the service teams. The service teams now tally the scan results using dashboards that provide aggregate scan results to produce detailed reporting and trend analysis.
