How To Write a Vulnerability Assessment Report

March 11, 2022

| Ethical Hacking

Vulnerability assessment reports play a vital role in ensuring the security of an organization’s applications, computer systems, and network infrastructure. The goal of a vulnerability assessment report is to highlight threats to an organization’s security posed by vulnerabilities in its IT environment.

Creating a vulnerability assessment report involves analyzing an organization’s systems, diagnosing system vulnerabilities, and describing the severity of those vulnerabilities. These assessments are carried out by security professionals who utilize a range of automated and manual testing tools. With the help of a vulnerability assessment, companies can understand their security posture and take measures to eliminate risks (EC-Council, 2020).

Vulnerability scanning includes automated network and system scans. Testers can also use penetration testing to locate vulnerabilities and determine the severity of a given risk. In this article, we’ll explain the core elements of a vulnerability assessment report.

Six Critical Elements of a Vulnerability Assessment Report

Because your client and their security team usually won’t have the time to read long explanations, it’s important to keep your report clear and concise—without omitting crucial information. Remember that you can link to quality sources to help others better understand the contents of the report while avoiding long segments of unnecessary text.

The below table outlines the six key elements of a vulnerability assessment report (EC-Council, n.d.).

Element	Description
Executive summary	Date range of the assessment Purpose and scope of the assessment General status of the assessment and summary of your findings regarding risk to the client Disclaimer
Scan results	Explanation of the scan results, such as how you’ve categorized and ordered vulnerabilities Overview of the types of reports provided
Methodology	Tools and tests you used for vulnerability scanning, such as penetration testing or cloud-based scans Specific purpose of each scan, tool, and test Testing environments for each tool used in the assessment
Findings	Which systems identified by the client you successfully scanned and which you did not Whether any systems were not scanned and, if so, the reasons why
Risk assessment	Index of all vulnerabilities identified, categorized as critical, high, medium, or low severity Explanation of the above risk categories List of all vulnerabilities with details on the plugin name, description, solution, and count information
Recommendations	Full list of actions the client should take Recommendations of other security tools the client can use to assess the network’s security posture Security policy and configuration recommendations

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References

EC-Council. (2020, May 20). All about penetration testing and vulnerability assessment. https://aware.eccouncil.org/all-about-penetration-testing-and-vulnerability-assessment.html

EC-Council. (n.d.).Introduction to CPENT. https://www.eccouncil.org/programs/certified-penetration-testing-professional-cpent/

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