A Proposed Visualization for Vulnerability Scan Data

System administrators make security decisions based on data provided by a variety of tools. Yet too often these tools do not structure the presentation of that data to support the communication and decision making needs of a variety of stakeholders within an organization. For example, consider the task of fixing system vulnerabilities based on network scans. Network vulnerability tools produce an overwhelming amount of raw data that is difficult to prioritize. The most critical vulnerabilities in the most sensitive systems must be addressed quickly, before attackers discover and exploit them. Additionally, non-security domain experts are often called upon to perform remediation and/or to make critical security decisions. As such, it is imperative that the security state of the network be communicated in such a way as to support these efforts. Unfortunately, current security tools that provide visualizations are complex and fail to provide actionable data. In this paper, we propose a new way to visualize vulnerability scan data by network zone using free and open-source tools to demonstrate how visualizations can be created to support decision making.