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Notes On Risk

This provides some notes on Risk Categories

The Risk Assessment Team (RAT) put each valid issue in 1 of 4 risk categories:

• Critical
• High
• Moderate
• Low

The RAT decides on the Risk category, according to their judgement. There is no fixed formula for setting the risk category. Various mitigating factors may lower the risk category, such as a vulnerability being difficult to exploit, or only being exploitable in rare circumstances. Certain situations may raise the risk category, such as a public exploit being available. The categories below are simply examples from past experience and discussions of which type of issue falls into which category.

Note that these properties refer to the potential for exploit, and have not been exploited.

Vulnerabilities which have been exploited are classed as Incidents and should be handled according to EGI CSIRT incident Handling procedure pdf file. See the EGI CSIRT Incident Reporting Wiki by reporting to abuse (at) egi.eu

You should then follow the

Critical

An anonymous or unauthorized user can gain root or admin access

An anonymous or unauthorized user can carry out widespread damage, data destruction or access to confidential data.

A public exploit is available allowing an authorized user to trivially gain root or admin access.

A public exploit is available allowing unauthorized access.

High

Most Root or admin exploits where the vulnerability has not been made public, where no public exploit exists, and only an authorized user can exploit the problem.

Most cases of identity theft and impersonation.

Most cases in which an authorized user in principle can carry out

 widespread destruction of data belonging to another group

An Information leak which is illegal or embarrassing.

Grid Wide denial of service.

Moderate

Potentially serious, but hard to exploit problems, where no actual exploit has been written and

producing one is seen as difficult.

 e.g. hard to exploit buffer overflow
 e.g. hard to exploit Race conditions

Most types of command injection vulnerability.

Problem where a user can cause disruption to services, but are easily traceable.

Low

Denial of service at single site.

Vulnerability in actual software - but if configured as instructed not exploitable.

Potential vulnerability identified, but not clear how to exploit it.

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