Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing as a Cyber Defence Technology

Complexity of systems are increasing day by day. This leads to more and more vulnerabilities in Systems. Attackers use these vulnerabilities to exploit the victim's system. It is better to find out these vulnerabilities in advance before attacker do. The power of Vulnerability assessment is usually underestimated. While Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing can be used as a cyber-defence technology to provide proactive cyber defence. In this paper we proved Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) as a Cyber defence technology, how we can provide active cyber defence using Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing. We described complete life cycle of Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing on systems or networks and proactive action taken to resolve that vulnerability and stop possible attack. In this paper we have described prevalent Vulnerability assessment techniques and some famous premium/open source VAPT tools. We have described complete process of how to use Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing as a powerful Cyber Defence Technology. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.