Some Basics

• A vulnerability is a weakness which can be exploited by an attacker.

• An exploit is a piece of code written to take advantage of a particular vulnerability.

• A payload is a piece of code to be executed through said exploit.

• The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system provides a reference-method for publicly known information-security vulnerabilities and exposures.

• Nessus is a proprietary vulnerability scanner developed by Tenable, Inc.

• Layer 7 refers to the top layer in the 7-layer OSI model of the Internet, also known as the "application layer."

• The HTTP requests and responses used to load webpages, for example, are layer 7 events.