Vulnerabilities and CVSS Scoring

What are vulnerabilities?

A vulnerability is a weakness in a system, application, or network that could be exploited by attackers to breach its security. Vulnerabilities can emerge from a variety of sources, including flawed software design, implementation errors, and misconfigurations. If successfully exploited, these vulnerabilities might enable unauthorized access, data theft, system crashes, or even the execution of malicious code.

Vulnerabilities can be broadly classified into five types. These are as follows.

OS vulnerabilities

OS vulnerabilities are weaknesses or flaws in an OS that can be exploited to compromise the security of a computer or network. An OS acts as the intermediary between hardware and software applications, making any vulnerability in it particularly concerning because it can lead to a broad range of security incidents. A few types of OS vulnerabilities include:

• Buffer overflows: This occurs when more data is written to a bufferTemporary data storage area than it can handle, leading to the overflow of excess data into adjacent storage.

• Unpatched systems: ...