This may mean using the vulnerabilities made public in order to audit a network for those vulnerabilities. It might also mean simply downloading patches and installing them. Full disclosure endeavors to give people the flexibility to take what they feel is appropriate action, rather than be hampered by insufficient information. Full disclosure is in many ways akin to the open-source movement that's taking the computer world by storm. Open source allows for peer review, learning, and collaboration that leads to making better software.
Full disclosure has similar goals.
By making the details of vulnerabilities public, it seeks to educate and inform, and at the same time to provide a basis upon which to take further action. For example, buffer overruns were once an obscure topic, but now they have been discussed and dissected to the point where many programmers understand how to prevent them, even if they are incapable of writing an exploit. Where there were once ten new exploits based on the buffer-overrun concept each week, the rate at which they are found has slowed to a trickle. The discussion of these problems in an open, collaborative forum helped to promote understanding, which in turn has significantly reduced the number of vulnerabilities of this type. In the same way that an open-source project benefits from the input of programmers worldwide scrutinizing its code base, system security has benefited from the scrutiny of full disclosure.