Cyber Security
Vulnerability Assessment
Finding, rating and prioritising weaknesses before attackers do.
- 10 notes
- 78 minutes of reading
- The vulnerability management lifecycleThe continuous process for handling security weaknesses: discovering assets and vulnerabilities, assessing and prioritising them, remediating, verifying fixes and reporting progress. 7 min · Beginner
- CVE, CVSS and EPSS: naming and scoring vulnerabilitiesHow publicly known vulnerabilities are identified with CVE IDs, how CVSS v4.0 scores severity, how EPSS estimates the chance of exploitation, and why the CISA KEV catalogue matters. 8 min · Intermediate
- Vulnerability scanning: authenticated, agent, internal and externalThe main types of vulnerability scanning, including authenticated and unauthenticated, agent-based and network-based, internal and external, and how to handle false positives and false negatives. 8 min · Intermediate
- Prioritising vulnerabilities by real riskHow to decide which vulnerabilities to fix first by combining exploitation evidence, likelihood, severity, exposure, asset value and compensating controls, with a worked example. 8 min · Intermediate
- Patch management: testing, rollout rings and emergency patchesHow to run patching as a reliable process: inventory, monitoring releases, testing, staged rollout rings, emergency patching, handling systems that cannot be patched, and measuring compliance. 8 min · Intermediate
- Vulnerability reporting and remediation trackingHow to turn vulnerability findings into fixed systems: assigning owners, setting remediation SLAs, handling exceptions properly, and reporting metrics that different audiences understand. 7 min · Intermediate
- Types of vulnerability: software, configuration, network, hardware, cloud and humanThe main kinds of security vulnerability, from software bugs and zero-days to misconfigurations, weak network services, hardware and firmware flaws, cloud mistakes and human or process gaps. 7 min · Beginner
- Types of vulnerability assessment and how they differ from penetration testsThe main kinds of vulnerability assessment, including network, host, wireless, application and database assessments, a simple step-by-step process, and how assessments compare with penetration testing and vulnerability management. 8 min · Beginner
- Configuration assessment: misconfigurations, CIS Benchmarks and hardeningHow to find and fix security misconfigurations using secure baselines such as the CIS Benchmarks, including default credentials, unneeded services, weak TLS, risky software, open ports and configuration drift. 8 min · Intermediate
- From vulnerability management to exposure management: CTEM, CSPM and metricsHow vulnerability management is widening into exposure management, including the five CTEM stages, external attack surface management, cloud posture tools, attack path analysis and metrics that show real risk reduction. 9 min · Advanced