Identifying and quantifying vulnerabilities in an environment. It is an in-depth evaluation of your posture, indicating weaknesses as well as providing the appropriate mitigation procedures required to either eliminate those weaknesses or reduce them to an acceptable level of risk. To do this, most vulnerability assessments follow these general steps: Cataloging assets and resources in a system Assigning quantifiable value and importance to the resources Identifying the vulnerabilities or potential threats to each resource And mitigating or eliminating the most serious vulnerabilities for the most valuable resources