Vulnerability AssessmentsFind And Fix Security Weaknesses

Every environment we assess has vulnerabilities. That is not a marketing line, that is physics. Patch lag, misconfigurations, deprecated protocols, forgotten services, and exposed management interfaces accumulate in any real-world network the moment it starts serving business. The question is not whether you have vulnerabilities; it is which ones, how exploitable they are, and which ones an attacker would use first.

A vulnerability assessment answers that question with evidence. We scan the network, the applications, and the cloud surface. We validate findings by hand so your report is not polluted with false positives. We score each finding by its real exploitability in your environment (not its generic CVSS number). And we hand you a remediation plan that tells you what to fix this week, this month, and this quarter, with enough detail that your team or ours can close each finding without further research.

Most organizations run a vulnerability assessment once or twice a year, typically driven by a compliance requirement. That cadence misses too much. We recommend continuous vulnerability management (ongoing authenticated scanning, automated ticketing, and remediation tracking) for any organization past fifty employees or handling regulated data. We can deliver the point-in-time assessment, the continuous program, or both.

Our methodology blends commercial scanners with industry-standard open-source tooling and manual analyst review. We use the same tools your auditors and insurers expect to see on a report: Nessus, Qualys, Rapid7 InsightVM, OpenVAS, Burp Suite, OWASP ZAP, and Nmap are all part of the baseline. For cloud-specific scans we use native posture tools plus targeted custom scripts. For Active Directory we use open-source AD review tooling and hand-validated queries.

Scanner coverage

Scanners are necessary, but they are not sufficient. A clean scanner run on a messy network produces a report that looks good and misses the things that matter. Our scanner configuration is tuned: non-intrusive for production systems, authenticated where we can be, and scheduled to minimize business impact. Every scan produces a raw dataset; then our analysts review and deduplicate.

Manual validation

Every critical and high finding is validated by an engineer. We confirm exploitability, we prune false positives, and we identify the specific configuration or patch that closes each finding. This is the work that separates our report from a scanner dump.

Real-world exploitability scoring

CVSS is a generic score. An unauthenticated remote code execution on an internet-facing system is critical in your environment; a theoretical buffer overflow on an internal printer with no known public exploit is not. We re-score findings against your environment, your exposure, and the current threat landscape so the roadmap reflects real risk.

Reporting

Every engagement produces three reports tuned to different audiences: an executive summary for leadership, a full technical report for your engineers, and a compliance mapping report for your auditor. All three are written the week of the assessment and delivered within five business days of scan completion.

The hardest part of a vulnerability assessment is not finding the issues, it is closing them. A two-hundred-finding report handed to a three-person IT team will sit on a shared drive and age out, not because anyone is careless but because the math does not work. We offer three models for remediation depending on where your team is:

• Guidance only. Your team fixes everything. We answer questions by email and in a shared channel for ninety days post-delivery, no additional cost.
• Co-remediation. Our engineers pair with yours on the hard findings (typically Active Directory hardening, certificate infrastructure, cloud identity, and legacy-platform migrations). You retain control; we bring the pattern library.
• Full remediation. Our team closes findings on a fixed or time-and-materials basis. Every finding moves from open to validated-closed with a clean audit trail. This is the right model for compliance-deadline-driven engagements and for small teams with no spare capacity.

Remediation integrates cleanly with our managed cybersecurity services if you want ongoing vulnerability management with continuous scanning, prioritization, and ticketing as a monthly service instead of a once-a-year event.

Most vulnerability assessments are scheduled because a compliance framework requires them. We design every engagement so the deliverable satisfies the specific framework you are under. If that framework is not yet decided, we can advise on what fits your industry and size.

Framework alignment we deliver against:

• PCI DSS 4.0: Requirement 11.3 quarterly external and internal vulnerability scanning, with evidence packaged for your QSA. ASV-grade external scanning available for merchants who need it.
• HIPAA Security Rule: 45 CFR 164.308(a)(1)(ii)(A) risk analysis and 164.308(a)(8) technical evaluation requirements, with findings mapped to Administrative, Physical, and Technical safeguards. See HIPAA compliance services.
• CMMC Levels 1, 2, and 3: RA.2.141 and RA.2.142 vulnerability identification and remediation practices aligned with NIST 800-171 Rev. 2 and the CMMC Assessment Guide. Our RPO #1449 practice lead owns this scope.
• NIST 800-53: RA-5 vulnerability monitoring and scanning, SI-2 flaw remediation, and SI-5 security alerts, advisories, and directives. Common for federal and federal-adjacent contractors.
• SOC 2 Type II: CC7.1 detection of anomalies and CC7.2 monitoring of system components, with the evidence updated on a schedule appropriate for your reporting period.
• ISO 27001: A.12.6 management of technical vulnerabilities, with a risk register entry per finding tied to your ISMS.
• Cyber insurance underwriting: most carriers now require an annual third-party vulnerability assessment as a prerequisite for coverage or for a favorable renewal rate. Our deliverables are structured for broker and carrier review.

A point-in-time vulnerability assessment tells you what is wrong today. By next week the environment has changed: a new application deployed, a Patch Tuesday missed, a new CVE published against a framework you use, a cloud workload spun up for a marketing campaign. Annual or quarterly snapshots miss most of what matters.

Our continuous vulnerability management program puts an authenticated scanner in your environment, scans on a schedule you set, triages findings daily, routes tickets to the team that owns the asset, and tracks remediation velocity over time. You get a month-over-month trend line showing whether your security posture is improving or degrading, which is the single most valuable metric for a security program.

Continuous programs cost less per year than you would guess because they are built around the same scanners and the same analyst time you would pay for a series of quarterly one-shots, just structured differently. Most clients cross over to continuous within the first two quarterly assessments once they see the value of the ticketing loop.

Every vulnerability assessment engagement produces the same deliverable set, customized to your environment and compliance context:

• Executive summary. Five to eight pages, business language, top risks, remediation budget estimate, and a traffic-light snapshot of your posture against each compliance framework in scope. Written to be read by non-technical leadership and by a board.
• Technical findings report. Every finding with severity, exploitability, affected systems, the evidence we collected, and the exact remediation steps (configuration change, patch version, policy update) required to close it.
• Risk-prioritized remediation roadmap. The order to fix findings in, tuned to your business and your team's capacity. What to fix this week, this month, and this quarter. What to accept, what to transfer to insurance, and what to retire (decommission the affected system entirely).
• Compliance evidence package. Control-by-control mapping for every framework in scope, with the supporting screenshots, configuration exports, and scan evidence your auditor expects to see. Updated versions available quarterly for continuous program clients.
• Raw scan data. The Nessus, Qualys, Burp, and OpenVAS output files, deduplicated and cleaned of false positives, for your team or a future assessor to use as a baseline.
• Debrief sessions. A ninety-minute technical debrief with your security and IT team, plus a separate leadership briefing if your executives want a walkthrough.
• Ninety-day remediation support. Email and Slack access to our assessment engineers during the ninety days after delivery, no additional cost, to answer remediation questions as your team closes findings.

You keep everything. The reports, the raw data, the scan configurations. No lock-in, no subscription to access findings later, no obligation to renew with us to keep using what you bought.

After more than two decades of running vulnerability assessments across the Triangle and the Southeast, patterns emerge. Knowing what we typically find helps you scope your remediation budget realistically and prepare your team for the findings they will see.

Patch lag on internet-facing systems

The single most common critical finding. A VPN appliance, a web server, a mail gateway, or a management portal running a version with a publicly-disclosed vulnerability. Internet-facing systems should be patched on a different cadence than internal systems, and very few organizations have that distinction formalized in their operations.

Weak or missing multi-factor authentication

MFA enabled on most accounts but not all. Service accounts without MFA. Legacy protocols still accepting basic authentication on a Microsoft 365 tenant. RDP or SSH exposed without MFA in front. Weak or SMS-only MFA on high-privilege accounts. Closing this category typically requires a policy push, a cleanup pass, and monitoring to catch drift.

Excessive privilege

Domain Admin accounts used for daily operations. Local administrator on every workstation for every user. Service accounts granted permissions far beyond what the service needs. Cloud IAM roles granted broad wildcards. Privilege right-sizing is the highest-impact cleanup work in most environments and takes the longest to land completely.

Unmanaged and shadow infrastructure

A server in a closet nobody has logged into in three years. A cloud instance spun up for a marketing campaign and never decommissioned. A development environment that holds production data. A subsidiary's network still bridged in after the acquisition completed. Inventory gaps are where the attacker's easiest wins live.

Outdated TLS and cryptographic configuration

TLS 1.0 and 1.1 still enabled somewhere. Weak cipher suites preferred. Self-signed certificates with no rotation. Outdated SSH algorithms. These findings rarely produce an immediate exploit but fail compliance checks and indicate the hygiene level of the environment overall.

Exposed management interfaces

Firewall admin UI, hypervisor management console, printer admin portal, network switch management, camera systems, or industrial control interfaces reachable from the wider network when they should be isolated to a management VLAN accessible only through a jump host.

Vulnerable third-party components in web applications

JavaScript libraries three major versions out of date. Java frameworks with known remote code execution vulnerabilities. WordPress plugins unpatched for years. The supply chain of modern web applications is vast and frequently unmonitored; this is where most web-application-specific findings come from.

Active Directory misconfiguration

Kerberoastable service accounts, unconstrained delegation, DCSync rights, stale privileged accounts, missing LAPS coverage, Group Policy misconfigurations that expose credentials. AD is both the core of most business networks and one of the least-reviewed systems in most organizations.

A vulnerability assessment is only as good as the engineer writing the report. Scanner output is commoditized. The value in an engagement comes from the validation, the prioritization, the compliance mapping, and the remediation guidance, all of which depend on an engineer who understands both the attacker side and the defender side of the work.

Our assessors are internal engineers, not subcontracted labor. Our practice is a CMMC-AB Registered Provider Organization (RPO #1449) with a practice lead who owns the scope. Our founder holds Digital Forensics Examiner #604180, which is a credential that requires ongoing recertification and puts our testimony on the stand in front of courts when incidents go to litigation. The same engineers who run our assessments also run incident response for our managed cybersecurity clients, which means they have recent-week experience watching how attackers actually operate in environments much like yours.

We do not sell the tools we use. The Nessus, Qualys, Rapid7, and Burp Suite licenses are operating costs to us, not a product line we push. When we recommend a CSPM platform, a SIEM, or a vulnerability management platform, the recommendation reflects what we think will work for your environment and your team, not what we earn a kickback on.

We also do not disappear after delivery. Ninety days of remediation support come with every engagement at no additional cost. For organizations that want the assessment to be the first step in an ongoing program, the same team continues the work under a continuous vulnerability management engagement. The people who wrote the report are the people who help you close it.