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Damage caused by attacks that exploit system vulnerabilities continues to occur, including personal information leakage, website defacement, system outages and access disruptions, and the use of compromised systems as attack platforms. When such incidents occur, they can result in substantial costs, including expenses for investigating the cause and implementing countermeasures, compensation for victims of information leakage, downtime costs, negative impacts caused by loss of trust from business partners, and, in some cases, fines for regulatory violations. To avoid these risks, it is necessary to provide opportunities to identify vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit.

Eliminating vulnerabilities and other security concerns also benefits the services you provide by allowing users to use them with confidence. In fact, in recent years, we have increasingly received inquiries from web application development companies whose customers require a third-party vulnerability assessment as a condition of delivery.

With growing awareness of security in recent years, we have received an increasing number of inquiries about these types of assessments. Because assessment providers sometimes use the terms "Penetration Test" and "Vulnerability Assessment" interchangeably, we often see cases where a Penetration Test is requested even though a Vulnerability Assessment would be more appropriate, or vice versa. If you are considering an assessment to ensure that your systems are not exposed to attacks, please refer to the information below to determine whether a Penetration Test or Vulnerability Assessment is more appropriate.

If any of the following applies to you, we recommend conducting a vulnerability assessment as soon as possible. Even if you use security products, some vulnerabilities cannot be protected against by those products.

• You have had a website publicly accessible on the Internet for some time but have never conducted a vulnerability assessment and would like to do so.
• You have not conducted a vulnerability assessment because you use security products, but have become concerned as you learned more about security.

If any of the following applies to you, we recommend conducting a vulnerability assessment before publication, allowing sufficient time for remediation after the assessment.

• You have created, expanded, or modified a website and want to identify vulnerabilities and risks before making it public.
• Your organization requires vulnerability assessments to be conducted periodically.
• The security requirements for a development project require a third-party vulnerability assessment before delivery.
• You have implemented secure programming based on guidelines and want to verify that it has been implemented correctly.

　

When creating, expanding, or modifying a website, we recommend conducting a vulnerability assessment before making it publicly accessible on the Internet. In addition, because new attack techniques are discovered every day, we also recommend conducting regular assessments of the entire website, approximately once a year.
For expansions and modifications, assessing only the areas that have changed and the areas affected by those changes can also significantly reduce risk.

In fact, we sometimes receive inquiries such as,
"We did not conduct a vulnerability assessment because our website does not contain personal information, but a business partner required one as part of its supply chain security measures," or
"We conducted an assessment once before launching the service, but several years have passed since then, and a customer raised concerns."

When an assessment is conducted, multiple high-risk vulnerabilities are sometimes identified. Ideally, an assessment should be conducted once before publication and then regularly once a year thereafter.