Vulnerability (computing) - Examples of Vulnerabilities

Examples of Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities are related to:

• physical environment of the system
• the personnel
• management
• administration procedures and security measures within the organization
• business operation and service delivery
• hardware
• software
• communication equipment and facilities
• and their combinations.

It is evident that a pure technical approach cannot even protect physical assets: you should have administrative procedure to let maintenance personnel to enter the facilities and people with adequate knowledge of the procedures, motivated to follow it with proper care. see Social engineering (security).

Four examples of vulnerability exploits:

• an attacker finds and uses an overflow weakness to install malware to export sensitive data;
• an attacker convinces a user to open an email message with attached malware;
• an insider copies a hardened, encrypted program onto a thumb drive and cracks it at home;
• a flood damages your computer systems installed at ground floor.