Every piece of software your business runs - your website, your email system, the apps that keep everything ticking over - occasionally has flaws in it.
Most get fixed quietly through routine updates. Some don't get fixed in time, and sit there, unnoticed, until someone finds them first.
A Vulnerability Scan is how you find them before someone else does.
What counts as a vulnerability
A vulnerability is simply a weakness in a piece of software or a system that could be used to gain access, disrupt a service, or extract data it shouldn't be possible to reach.
New vulnerabilities are discovered all the time, across every kind of software - not because companies are careless, but because software is complicated, and complicated things have flaws.
Most vulnerabilities are harmless in practice, either because they're hard to exploit or because the conditions needed rarely occur. Others are serious, and become the entry point attackers actively look for - particularly once a fix has been published and the flaw becomes public knowledge.
What a Vulnerability Scan does
Our Vulnerability Scan checks your systems against a constantly updated list of known weaknesses and tells you which ones apply to you.
Instead of hoping nothing's been missed, you get a clear, ranked list: what's exposed, how serious it is, and what to fix first.
This runs daily, not as a single check. Software that was secure last yesterday may not be this today, simply because a new flaw has come to light.
Why "we haven't been hacked" isn't the same as "we're not exposed"
It's easy to treat the absence of an obvious problem as reassurance. But most vulnerabilities don't announce themselves.
Nothing changes about how your website looks or how your email works until someone uses that weakness to get in - at which point it's no longer a vulnerability, it's an incident.
Attackers don't need to target you specifically to find these gaps. Many simply scan large numbers of businesses looking for whichever ones happen to be running something exploitable.
Sophos's 2026 State of Ransomware report found that exploited vulnerabilities were the way in for 18% of ransomware attacks last year.
What good remediation looks like
Not every vulnerability needs fixing today. Some are low risk and can wait for a routine update; others need attention immediately.
The value of a proper scan isn't just the list - it's the ranking, so your time goes on the issues that matter most, rather than everything at once.
Getting started
Your free HackRisk Report includes a snapshot of your current vulnerability exposure, ranked by severity, so you know exactly where to start.
It's completely free, and arrives within 24 hours.
