Vulnerability Management and Patching

Flashcards covering the vocabulary of vulnerability management, asset discovery, risk assessment tools, and remediation frameworks as discussed in the lecture.

Vulnerability Management

An ongoing risk based approach to discovering, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Vulnerability

A weakness or a hole in a defense that can be exploited by an attacker.

Risk

A value calculated by considering the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited combined with the impact of the exploitation if it happened.

Asset Discovery

The process of finding out what systems and services are present in a network, including hosts, running services, and service versions.

Nmap

A simple Unix tool used for asset discovery to look for active hosts, available ports, and service information.

Asset Management

The process of administering endpoints from a central location to identify vulnerabilities and perform remediation.

Service Discovery

A process using tools to determine what specific software versions are running on identified open ports.

Vulnerability Enumeration

Listing attributes of endpoints, such as operating systems and applications, and mapping them against known vulnerabilities.

Authenticated Vulnerability Integration

A vulnerability assessment where the tool has login access to the endpoint, allowing it to see deeper into running processes and privileges.

Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)

A machine-readable inventory, often in JSON format, of all software components running on an endpoint.

Syft

An open source command line tool used to automatically generate a Software Bill of Materials by scanning images, directories, or file systems.

Juice Shop

An intentionally insecure application created by OWASP for testing vulnerability tools and use cases.

Grype

A tool that takes a Software Bill of Materials as input and compares it against known vulnerabilities to identify affected components.

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

A system that estimates the probability of a vulnerability being exploited within the next $30$ days.

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)

A unique identifier or tag assigned to a disclosed vulnerability in the security community.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)

An inventory or catalog that assigns a severity score to vulnerabilities on a scale of $1$ to $10$.

CISA KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities)

A catalog by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that identifies vulnerabilities with actual evidence of exploitation in the real world.

Application Security Testing

A method of finding vulnerabilities by using tools to poke and prod an application, such as performing a series of HTTP requests.

ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy)

A tool originally developed by OWASP that performs scans against web applications to identify vulnerabilities and recommend solutions.

Interim Risk Reduction

Temporary activities used to reduce risk when a patch cannot be applied immediately, such as disabling a feature or adjusting firewall zones.