Which vulnerabilities found in a scan conducted by a QSA need to be addressed?

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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.

This was first published in June 2007

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