Glossary

VM Guest Responsibility

VM guest responsibility covers customer-controlled image, operating system, packages, hardening, application, identity, data, guest controls, agents, patching, backup, and recovery.

VM Image Provenance

VM image provenance links an immutable image identifier to its base source, build definition, inputs, builder, hardening version, package inventory, tests, signer, and creation time.

VM Integration

Integrating vulnerability management with adjacent functions, asset inventory, patching, ticketing, IR, so VM data flows into operational work rather than sitting in standalone reports.

VM Maturity Model

A model for assessing vulnerability-management program maturity from basic scanning through risk-prioritized, integrated, automated remediation, that helps programs see where they are and where to invest next.

VM Outcome Communication

VM outcome communication explains how validated exposure changed, what remains, how confident the evidence is, who owns action, and which decisions are required.

VM Patching at Cloud Scale

Patching cloud VM fleets at scale, often via image rebuilds or scheduled rolling updates, rather than in-place patches, since cloud-native patterns favor replace over update.

VM Program Integration

VM program integration connects vulnerability work with asset and service ownership, software delivery, cloud and endpoint management, procurement, threat intelligence, incidents, changes, and risk governance.

VM Program Metrics

The metrics that measure a vulnerability-management program, MTTR, SLA compliance, critical-vulnerability backlog, scan coverage, that give leaders a credible view of program health.

VM Reporting to Leadership

Communicating vulnerability-management posture and progress to leadership clearly and credibly, what's at risk, what's improving, what investments help, that turns VM data into decision support.

VM Runtime Coverage

VM runtime coverage maps investigation and response questions to guest, application, identity, network, control-plane, configuration, vulnerability, and sensor-health telemetry.

VM Runtime Protection

Protecting cloud VMs at runtime, monitoring process behavior, file changes, network connections, often via EDR or specialized cloud-workload agents, complementing configuration and image controls.

VM SLA and SLO Design

VM SLA and SLO design defines governed response and remediation expectations with trigger, population, clock rules, target, verification, exception treatment, escalation, and reporting.

VM Scope and Asset Reconciliation

VM scope and asset reconciliation compares the intended asset population with what assessment sources actually observed and resolves missing, duplicate, stale, excluded, or unidentified records.

VM Security in Cloud

Securing cloud VMs from a cloud-engineering perspective, image, IAM, network, encryption, hardening, that an engineer implements as part of cloud infrastructure work.

VM-specific Cloud Telemetry

Telemetry distinct to cloud VMs, metadata-service access, control-plane API calls, instance-level network logs, that goes beyond on-prem endpoint data and is essential for cloud workload detection.

VPC Assessment

A structured assessment of a VPC (or set of VPCs) for security, posture, routing, segmentation, exposure, and connectivity, used to find misconfigurations and risky design choices.

VPC Design

Designing a VPC (or set of VPCs) for security and operations, subnet layout, routing, gateways, segmentation, the engineering decisions that shape what's possible to enforce later.

VPC Flow Log Analysis

Analyzing VPC flow logs (per-flow records of who talked to whom, when, and how much) to investigate cloud incidents, detect anomalies, and verify connectivity, a key cloud IR data source.

VPN Limitations

Limitations of traditional VPNs that drive zero-trust adoption, perimeter trust on connect, lateral movement once inside, weak device posture, that ZTA replaces with continuous, per-request verification.

VPN and ZTA Coexistence

VPN and ZTA coexistence treats a tunnel as protected transport without allowing network connection itself to become broad resource authorization.

Valid Accounts

An ATT&CK technique: attackers using legitimate, working credentials (stolen, leaked, or default) for access, evasion, and persistence. Often the leading initial-access vector in modern breaches.

Validating Webhooks

Verifying that webhook requests come from the expected sender, via signed payloads, HMAC verification, or source-IP checks, since webhook endpoints are publicly reachable and trivially spoofable otherwise.

Vanity Metrics

SOC metrics that look impressive but don't actually drive better outcomes, alerts per day, total signatures deployed, that distract from metrics that matter and can mislead leadership.

Vendor Due Diligence

The structured assessment of a vendor's security and risk posture before engaging or renewing, security questionnaires, SOC 2 review, evidence checks, that grounds the relationship in informed risk acceptance.

Vendor Intelligence

Intelligence specifically about an organization's vendors, their incidents, vulnerabilities, threats targeting them, that informs ongoing third-party risk and supply-chain decisions.

Vendor Landscape

The current map of cloud-workload-protection vendors, their categories, strengths, and overlap, that informs tooling decisions in a fast-evolving market.

Vendor Questionnaires

Structured questionnaires sent to vendors to gather information about their security and risk posture, the most common instrument of TPRM due diligence and a foundational risk-management practice.

Vendor Risk Management

The governance discipline that manages risk arising from third-party vendor relationships, related to TPRM but emphasizing the program and governance lens over operational lifecycle.

Vendor Tiering

Categorizing vendors by criticality and risk so due diligence depth, contractual requirements, and monitoring scale with actual exposure, a foundational TPRM practice.

Version and Backport Analysis

Version and backport analysis evaluates product-specific version, build, package-revision, and vendor-advisory rules to determine whether a security fix is present.

Vertical Privilege Escalation

Privilege escalation that gains higher-level access than the user has, from regular user to admin, in contrast to horizontal escalation that accesses another peer's account.