Criticality (Severity Rating)

The following are Severity Rating values.

Extremely Critical

This value is typically used for remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that can lead to system compromise.

Successful exploitation does not normally require any interaction and exploits are in the wild.

These vulnerabilities can exist in services like FTP, HTTP, and SMTP or in certain client systems such as email programs or browsers.

Highly Critical

This value is typically used for remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that can lead to system compromise.

Successful exploitation does not normally require any interaction, but there are no known exploits available at the time of disclosure.

These vulnerabilities can exist in services like FTP, HTTP, and SMTP or in client systems, such as email programs or browsers.

Moderately Critical

This value is typically used for remotely exploitable Denial of Service vulnerabilities against services like FTP, HTTP, and SMTP, and for vulnerabilities that allow system compromises but require user interaction.

This rating is also used for vulnerabilities allowing system compromise on LANs in services like SMB, RPC, NFS, LPD and similar services that are not intended for use over the Internet.

Less Critical

This value is typically used for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

This rating is also used for vulnerabilities allowing exposure of sensitive data to local users.

Not Critical

This value is typically used for very limited privilege escalation vulnerabilities and locally exploitable Denial of Service vulnerabilities.

This rating is also used for non-sensitive system information disclosure vulnerabilities (for example, remote disclosure of installation path of applications).