A Survey of Vulnerability Assessment Tools for Cyber Security

Vulnerability scanning tools are rapidly becoming integral to organizational cybersecurity. These tools aid in the identification and assessment of system and application weaknesses. Given the complexity of modern cyberattacks, the automation of these tools aids in the security of cyber assets. This survey provides an overview of the scanning tools, their architectures, methodologies, capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, and the domains where they are applied. This study surveys scanners in the environments they are built for and provides a summary of major scanning tools such as Nmap, Nessus, OpenVAS, Nikto, Burp Suite, OWASP ZAP, Acunetix, Qualys, Nexpose. This survey discusses the nascent trends such as the use of artificial intelligence for automated vulnerability assessment, the security scanning of cloud-native applications, and the DevSecOps paradigm