Continuous security monitoring is a very important part of an organization.
An attacker looking for a vulnerability will not wait for annual security audits or patches to happen every quarter. If they happen to find a vulnerability, they will go ahead and try to exploit it.
Along with this, new vulnerabilities will not wait for our vulnerability scanning, pen testing, and patch management life cycle to be discovered.
New vulnerabilities are discovered at any moment of time, and if they are of higher risks, then the organization has to make sure to mitigate the risk associated with it in order to prevent it from being exploited.
Before we go ahead and understand this in detail, let's understand three important terms that we will use quite often throughout the chapter:
- Vulnerability
- Exploit
- Payload
We will take a simple analogy...