EXPERT RESPONSE
The PCI Security Standards Council has defined procedures for Approved Scanning Vendors (ASV) to follow. There are five levels of vulnerabilities identified by PCI. An ASV scan must not show any high-level vulnerabilities, which are defined as Levels 3-5. All high-level vulnerabilities must be demonstrably mitigated before an external network can be considered compliant. This table broadly defines these severity levels:
|
Level
|
Severity
|
Description
|
|
5
|
Urgent
|
Trojan horses; file read-and-write exploit;
remote command execution
|
|
4
|
Critical
|
Potential Trojan horses; file read exploit
|
|
3
|
High
|
Limited exploit of read; directory browsing; denial of service
|
|
2
|
Medium
|
Sensitive configuration information can be obtained by
hackers
|
|
1
|
Low
|
Information can be obtained by hackers on configuration
|
For more information review the ASV Scanning Procedures document available on the PCI Security Council's Web site.
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