Practical Linux Security Cookbook - Second Edition

Vulnerability assessment

A vulnerability assessment is the process of auditing your network and system security, through which you can come to know about the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your network. The first phase in vulnerability assessment is reconnaissance, and this further leads to the phase of system readiness, in which we mainly check for all known vulnerabilities in the target. Next follows the phase of reporting in which we group all the vulnerabilities found into categories of low, medium, and high risk.