16 Best Vulnerability Scanning Software QAs Are Using In 2023

Intruder is a cloud-based vulnerability scanner that aims to help businesses of all sizes discover security weaknesses in their online systems. The tool provides continuous monitoring of the network to identify vulnerabilities and reduce the attack surface.

Intruder provides a proactive security monitoring service, which includes regular scans to detect new threats as they emerge. Its network vulnerability scanning checks for over 10,000 vulnerabilities automatically. The tool then prioritizes the results to help focus on the issues that matter most and provide clear information on how to fix them.

Integrations are natively available with Slack, MS Teams, Jira, Github, and Gitlab. Other integrations can be accessed through Zapier and API.

Intruder costs from $196/month/application. A 14-day free trial is also available.

New Relic is an all-in-one observability platform that helps you monitor, troubleshoot, and tune your full stack. It allows companies to monitor and enhance their network’s security by identifying possible weaknesses that could be exploited by hackers. With New Relic, you can proactively scan their systems for potential vulnerabilities, getting a comprehensive overview of their security status, which can help in making informed decisions and creating effective cybersecurity strategies.

Moreover, New Relic offers real-time vulnerability scanning, which is exceptionally crucial in today's rapidly-evolving digital landscape where new threats emerge by the minute. With its continuous and automatic scanning, you can quickly detect and resolve any security issues. The platform's vulnerability triage feature gives you information based on criticality. Then, it displays a prioritized list of your vulnerable libraries as well as suggestions on which libraries to update to. This is perfect if you are not sure what to prioritize.

Lastly, New Relic's vulnerability scanning is known for its accuracy. The tool's comprehensive scanning capabilities dramatically reduce false positives, ensuring that the IT team's focus is not diverted by irrelevant alerts. The quality of its reporting also provides teams with all the crucial information needed to address vulnerabilities effectively. By providing a clear picture of the security landscape of a system, New Relic makes it easier.

New Relic integrates with over 600 applications within the categories of application monitoring, infrastructure, security, traffic simulation, logging, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Services, open-source monitoring, machine learning ops, and Prometheus.

Qualys analyzes misconfigurations and threats across your global tech environment with six sigma accuracy. The system provides real-time alerts on zero-day vulnerabilities, compromised assets, and network irregularities. You can quarantine compromised assets with a single click, buying you more time to investigate and contain an attack.

To protect your IT environment, you need to know which assets are connected to your network. Qualys’ free Global AssetView application helps security teams accomplish this by automatically identifying all known and unknown assets on a network. You can quickly grab detailed information about each asset, including installed software, running services, and vendor lifecycle information. The application also helps with asset organization, enabling teams to categorize assets into product families with custom tagging.

Qualys supports native integrations with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Pricing is based on several factors, including the number of user licenses, Qualys Cloud Platform Apps, internal web applications, and IP addresses your team will be utilizing.

Acunetix is a penetration testing tool that is easy to use, and provides an array of features accessible to any level of a development team. Acunetix provides a quick analysis that can identify high risk vulnerabilities, as well as the ability to send different types of reports to various levels from board member to developer, tailored especially for the recipient. Acunetix provides the ability for continuous scanning, allowing you to schedule regular scans of targets which checks for vulnerabilities in your infrastructure repeatedly. This allows you to have continuous security awareness of your organization's vulnerability level. The feature also allows you to pause the scan at any time. Acunetix integrates with issue trackers such as Jira, Bugzilla and Mantis. Acunetix offers customized pricing upon request.

Burp Suite offers vulnerability scanning tools to fit the needs of enterprises and individual QA testers. Enterprise DevSecOps teams benefit from Burp Suite’s ability to automate security testing at scale. Manual and automated penetration testing is available in Burp Suite Professional Edition, which was designed for individual use by security engineers and bug bounty hunters.

Burp Suite features a research-based vulnerability scanning tool known as Burp Scanner. PortSwigger’s research team regularly discovers vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them, providing advanced protection to users.

Burp Scanner also has a powerful crawl engine that can easily navigate obstacles like CSRF tokens and volatile URLs. It can also handle crawling JavaScript-heavy applications other scanners can’t with its embedded Chromium browser.

Development teams can easily integrate Burp Suite into their tech stack with integrations available for Jenkins and Jira.

Burp Suite Enterprise starts at $6,995/year. Burp Suite Professional costs $399 with a free trial available.

Tenable’s Cyber Exposure Platform helps businesses protect every corner of their web environment, including applications, data, and cloud infrastructure. Tenable is known for developing Nessus, a fully portable vulnerability scanner. Nessus offers comprehensive remote and local scanning capabilities while maintaining low operating costs.

IT teams can scan a broad range of network devices, including firewalls, routers, switches, printers, and storage to identify security vulnerabilities. Nessus also covers cloud applications and instances, such as Salesforce and AWS. Your team can detect various threats, including viruses, malware, backdoors, and web services linking to malicious content.

Prioritizing vulnerabilities is simple with Tenable’s Top 10 Reporting, which assigns a Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) to the most critical threats detected during a scan. VPR calculations are based on several criteria, including the vulnerability’s age, the exploit code’s maturity, and how many of your products are affected.

Tenable integrates with Splunk, ARCON, CyberArk, and many other security operations platforms.

Pricing for Nessus Pro starts at $3,390 for a one-year license. Organizations can try Nessus Pro free for seven days.

Invicti is a simple to use web application scanner built for enterprise security teams. Security analysts gravitate to Invicti because of its ability to automate nearly all pre-and post-scan tasks. Invicti also leads the industry in scan accuracy based on independent benchmark tests performed against other vulnerability scanning tools. The platform blends dynamic and interactive scanning, helping teams discover actual vulnerabilities and fewer false positives.

Producing secure code is how you prevent vulnerabilities. Invicti helps software teams accomplish this with its vulnerability location feature. Security analysts can see the exact lines of code that need fixing when Invicti’s IAST sensor is deployed. As a result, developers receive the information they need to fix software issues faster.

Invicti was designed to embed security into your entire software development lifecycle with more than 50 integrations. Development teams can connect Invicti to Jenkins, Jira, GitLab, and other leading CI/CD tools.

Pricing is available upon request.

Cyberpion is an external attack surface management (EASM) solution that helps organizations identify and manage previously unknown, high-risk assets. The platform’s intelligent vulnerability assessment engine provides deep insights into the connected assets posing the highest risk to your digital landscape. Threat mitigation is automated with Cyberpion’s Active Protection tool, which immediately neutralizes assets vulnerable to attack.

Cyberpion runs continuous, multi-layered vulnerability scans and assessments across your entire attack surface. The assessment engine conducts web, cloud, DNS, PKI, and TLS analyses, providing a comprehensive snapshot of your organization’s security posture. With this information, your team can take action against the connected assets that pose a risk to your IT environment.

Integrations are available with Splunk, Cortex XSOAR, ServiceNow, and Azure.

Pricing is available upon request.

Rapid7 delivers cybersecurity and compliance solutions to help organizations manage vulnerabilities in their IT environment. Security analysts can automate threat monitoring across multiple platforms, including local, cloud, and virtual infrastructure. With Rapid7’s expertly vetted detections, your security team can maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio and mitigate critical threats early.

Rapid7 also protects against external threats with Threat Command. The external threat intelligence tool monitors thousands of sources across the clear and dark web to identify threats targeting your business. Threat Command delivers highly contextualized alerts, enabling teams to turn threat intelligence into action quickly.

Rapid7 users have access to a robust library of integrations with third-party tools, including Azure, Proofpoint, AWS, Teams, Cisco, Slack, and Jira.

Various plans are available for each of Rapid7’s products. Organizations can purchase each solution individually or together.

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is a free vulnerability scanner designed for small to medium-sized businesses. QA analysts can scan local and remote systems to identify common IIS and SQL administrative vulnerabilities, like weak passwords or too many admin accounts and missing security updates.

Users can scan multiple computers by domain or IP address range. After each scan, MBSA provides a detailed report on which systems were scanned, the vulnerabilities found, and step-by-step instructions on fixing each issue. QA analysts can quickly access security reports for each computer from MBSA’s GUI. Reports older than seven days will indicate a new scan should be performed, ensuring your team maintains a regular cadence of security monitoring.

MBSA is compatible with Windows Server 2008 R2, Server 2003, Server 2008, Vista, XP, and Windows 2000.