IONIX is an External Exposure Management platform designed to help organizations identify exposed assets and validate exploitable vulnerabilities from an attacker's perspective. It enables security teams to prioritize critical remediation activities by providing complete attack surface visibility, identifying potential exposed assets, validating risks, and prioritizing issues by severity and context. Learn more.
The IONIX platform offers Attack Surface Discovery, Risk Assessment, Risk Prioritization, and Risk Remediation. It helps organizations discover all relevant assets, monitor their changing attack surface, and ensure more assets are covered with less noise. Attack Surface Discovery, Risk Assessment, Risk Prioritization, and Risk Remediation are core modules.
The Complete Vulnerability Assessment Checklist by IONIX includes detailed steps and criteria for identifying, evaluating, and addressing vulnerabilities within an organization's systems. It is divided into three sections: Pre-Assessment, Assessment, and Post-Assessment. Access the checklist here.
The vulnerability assessment checklist is divided into three sections: Pre-Assessment, Assessment, and Post-Assessment.
A vulnerability assessment checklist is designed to ensure that all potential vulnerabilities in a system are identified and addressed. It helps organizations maintain a strong security posture by systematically evaluating their systems.
Conventional vulnerability assessments often fall short in dynamic, cloud-centric environments due to their lack of focus on exploitability.
A vulnerability assessment tool is an automated software solution that scans and identifies security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations within an infrastructure.
IONIX is tailored for Information Security and Cybersecurity VPs, C-level executives, IT managers, and security managers across industries, including Fortune 500 companies. Industries represented in case studies include Insurance and Financial Services, Energy, Critical Infrastructure, IT and Technology, and Healthcare.
Yes. E.ON used IONIX to continuously discover and inventory their internet-facing assets and external connections, improving risk management (read more). Warner Music Group boosted operational efficiency and aligned security operations with business goals (learn more). Grand Canyon Education enhanced security measures by proactively discovering and remediating vulnerabilities in dynamic IT environments (details).
Customers can expect improved risk management, operational efficiency, cost savings, and enhanced security posture. IONIX helps visualize and prioritize hundreds of attack surface threats, streamlines security operations with actionable insights, reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR), and protects brand reputation and customer trust. Learn more.
IONIX solves problems such as identifying the complete external web footprint (including shadow IT and unauthorized projects), enabling proactive security management, providing real attack surface visibility from an attacker’s perspective, and ensuring continuous discovery and inventory of internet-facing assets and dependencies.
IONIX identifies the entire external web footprint, including shadow IT and unauthorized projects, improving risk management. It proactively identifies and mitigates threats before they escalate, provides attacker-focused visibility for better risk prioritization, and continuously tracks assets and dependencies to maintain an up-to-date inventory in dynamic environments.
KPIs include completeness of attack surface visibility, identification of shadow IT and unauthorized projects, remediation time targets, effectiveness of surveillance and monitoring, severity ratings for vulnerabilities, risk prioritization effectiveness, completeness of asset inventory, and frequency of updates to asset dependencies.
Getting started with IONIX is simple and efficient. The initial deployment takes about a week and requires only one person to implement and scan the entire network. Customers have access to onboarding resources like guides, tutorials, webinars, and a dedicated Technical Support Team. Learn more.
IONIX offers streamlined onboarding resources such as guides, tutorials, webinars, and a dedicated Technical Support Team to assist customers during the implementation process. Learn more.
IONIX provides technical support and maintenance services during the subscription term, including troubleshooting, upgrades, and maintenance. Customers are assigned a dedicated account manager and benefit from regular review meetings. More details.
IONIX is SOC2 compliant and supports companies with their NIS-2 and DORA compliance, ensuring robust security measures and regulatory alignment.
IONIX helps organizations meet regulatory requirements by providing SOC2 compliance and supporting NIS-2 and DORA compliance. The platform ensures robust security measures and regulatory alignment for customers.
IONIX integrates with tools like Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Palo Alto Cortex/Demisto, and AWS services such as AWS Control Tower, AWS PrivateLink, and Pre-trained Amazon SageMaker Models. See all integrations.
Yes, IONIX has an API that supports integrations with major platforms like Jira, ServiceNow, Splunk, Cortex XSOAR, and more. Learn more.
Technical documentation, guides, datasheets, and case studies are available on the IONIX resources page. Explore resources.
IONIX earned top ratings for product innovation, security, functionality, and usability. It was named a leader in the Innovation and Product categories of the ASM Leadership Compass for completeness of product vision and a customer-oriented, cutting-edge approach to ASM. Source.
Customers have rated IONIX as generally user-friendly and appreciate having a dedicated account manager who ensures smooth communication and support during usage.
IONIX offers ML-based 'Connective Intelligence' for better asset discovery and fewer false positives, Threat Exposure Radar for prioritizing critical issues, and comprehensive digital supply chain coverage. Unlike alternatives, IONIX reduces noise, validates risks, and provides actionable insights, ensuring maximum risk reduction and operational efficiency. Learn more.
Customers should choose IONIX for its innovative features, including better discovery, focused threat exposure, comprehensive digital supply chain coverage, and streamlined remediation. IONIX provides actionable insights, reduces false positives, and ensures efficient risk reduction. Why IONIX.
Yes, IONIX's blog offers articles and updates on cybersecurity and risk management. Read our Blog.
The IONIX blog covers topics such as vulnerability management, exposure management, industry trends, and best practices. Key authors include Amit Sheps and Fara Hain.
Stay updated with the latest insights on the IONIX Blog.
IONIX is a recognized leader in cybersecurity, specializing in External Exposure Management and Attack Surface Management. The company was named a leader in the 2025 KuppingerCole Attack Surface Management Leadership Compass and won the Winter 2023 Digital Innovator Award from Intellyx. IONIX has secured Series A funding to accelerate growth and expand its platform capabilities. Source.
Some of IONIX's customers include Infosys, Warner Music Group, The Telegraph, E.ON, Grand Canyon Education, and a Fortune 500 Insurance Company. See more.
In this article
Vulnerability assessments—as part of your company’s vulnerability management strategy—are an essential step. Through a vulnerability assessment, your organization can find critical vulnerabilities and keep your assets safe. But it is not always clear where to start with such assessments. Accordingly, this blogpost provides a comprehensive checklist for performing vulnerability assessments; in addition, it addresses both organizations and security testers. Our goal is to help you keep your security posture up, so that malicious attacks are kept at bay.
But first: what’s the difference between vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (pentest)?
A vulnerability assessment and a penetration test (pentest) are both crucial in identifying weaknesses in a system, but they differ significantly in their approach and objectives.
As part of an organization’s proactive security strategy, vulnerability assessment is a comprehensive evaluation of a system to identify, and prioritize vulnerabilities. It is generally automated, using vulnerability scanning tools to scan for known vulnerabilities, and provides a broad overview of potential security weaknesses.
In contrast, penetration testing is a more targeted adversarial security approach. It simulates a real-world attack to exploit security weaknesses in a system, assessing the effectiveness of security measures and the potential impact of a breach.
While vulnerability assessments offer a wide-ranging view of potential security issues, pentests provide a deeper, more practical insight into how an attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities, often involving a combination of manual and automated techniques.
The vulnerability assessment checklist can be broken up to three sections, representing the typical lifecycle of a vulnerability assessment: pre-assessment, assessment, and post-assessment.
1) Create an asset inventory
Creating an asset inventory is a crucial step in identifying potential security risks and vulnerabilities that a company might face. Assets could include:
However, it is not always straightforward to identify all the assets of an organization, especially if it is a large enterprise with a broad attack surface. Shadow IT, for instance, could make some assets challenging to uncover.
Circumventing these limitations, attack surface discovery tools are an automated option for asset discovery, finding many of the asset types listed above in real-time.
2) Set the scope
Limited in duration and resources, vulnerability assessments must be concise. Therefore, setting an assessment scope is crucial: it dictates to security testers what features to prioritize and which assets to test.
A scope varies depending on an organization’s compliance requirements and threat model. A hospital that must maintain HIPAA compliance, for example, would prioritize systems that store medical data. Likewise, a software company that builds a password manager would include its web and mobile applications in scope, focusing on user password confidentiality. Which of the assets are in scope depends on an organization’s security goals.
3) Choose the methodology
A set methodology is also necessary for a vulnerability assessment. It shall determine the following:
4) Prepare the testing environment or scope items
Before starting a vulnerability assessment, a company may need to prepare the scope items or testing environment. Indeed, looking for vulnerabilities in production could lead to unintended consequences such as downtime or data leakage. Testers typically need:
1) Run automated tools
The initial step of a vulnerability assessment is running automated tools. The tools are selected in the methodology (pre-assessment) and are related to the assets in scope. Additionally, fingerprinting or reconnaissance (recon) tools are necessary in black-box or gray-box testing, where testers have limited visibility.
After some time, scanners produce a report with their results. The report would include the discovered vulnerabilities, their evidence, and their corresponding severities. It is worth noting that automated tools are prone to false positives; therefore, testers must manually verify scanner results before continuing their assessment.
2) Manual security review
The second step is manual security review. Penetration testing and other active security validation processes are often still conducted manually due to their complexity and potential disruption to systems. Some security issues are challenging to find with automation, such as race conditions, logic bugs, or access control gaps. This is especially the case for testing applications, where context is required for interacting with features. Furthermore, some scanner results could require additional review—such as a cryptographic issue whose impact is unclear.
Each asset type comes with its vulnerability classes. Web applications, for example, are usually vulnerable to OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Security Risks:
As such, a tester would try to identify common vulnerabilities unique to each asset type. Additionally, manual security review can be complemented by source code review in the case of white-box testing. This helps in identifying security flaws that may be hard to detect otherwise.
3) Gather evidence
Along the way, testers gather evidence of the vulnerabilities they verified. The evidence can come in the form of screenshots, proof-of-concept scripts, steps to reproduce instructions, or vulnerable source-code snippets. By documenting this evidence, testers can provide a clear picture of the identified vulnerabilities and help the development team understand the risks associated with them.
4) Determine the severity of findings
To prioritize the mitigation of findings, each vulnerability should be assigned a severity—low, medium, high, or critical. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a popular severity scoring tool. However, severity can vary depending on the organization’s threat model and the application’s context. It also does not cover risks such as misconfigurations, which are very common and often more dangerous.
Consider a scenario where a company’s marketing blog has a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. If the XSS provides access to user sessions, the XSS could be classified as medium severity or higher, depending on the sensitivity of the actions or data. However, if the marketing blog is on a different subdomain and has no access to user sessions, the severity could be classified as low. In other words, context changes severity.
1) Write a report
After completing their assessment, testers create a detailed report for the company and stakeholders. The report should include an executive summary and details on each discovered vulnerability:
Moreover, the report should address the company’s security posture:
A comprehensive report helps the company understand its security risks and take appropriate measures to mitigate them.
2) Mitigate vulnerabilities
After identifying vulnerabilities in the assessment, the next step is mitigation. The company must assign the fixes to the appropriate developers or specialists. For example, a firewall misconfiguration could be assigned to the system administrators or the IT team. It is also important to prioritize the vulnerabilities based on their severity. Higher severity vulnerabilities should be addressed first.
[A screenshot of a GitHub pull request entitled, “Patch XSS in api.example.net/v1/storage/greet”. It includes a code snippet that escapes the user input to mitigate the vulnerability.]
Once patched, a vulnerability must be retested. Retesting ensures that a fix is sufficient and cannot be circumvented.
3) Learn from the assessment
Lastly, the assessment serves as a learning lesson. Some vulnerabilities could indicate organizational issues, such as broken security processes or insufficient policies. Code-related issues may show gaps in a DevOps process—for example, inadequate static analysis or code review. Remediation isn’t simply code in, code out. Processes, workflows, and policies may need revision.
Potential threats are everywhere in the modern digital landscape, making vulnerability assessments indispensable for any forward-thinking organization. By understanding their infrastructure’s weaknesses, companies can take proactive measures, ensuring they remain one step ahead of potential cyber adversaries. Our vulnerability assessment checklist serves as a comprehensive guide to finding those weaknesses: it covers everything from how to prepare for an assessment to what comes after.
Still, there is more that can help.
Tools such as IONIX’s comprehensive attack surface management solution can simplify the vulnerability assessment process, giving you a better view of your attack surface. IONIX further provides a full range of security options, including:
Book a demo to learn more about how IONIX can help your security team identify critical vulnerabilities and proactively remediate them to reduce the attack surface.
