Patent ID: 8549628

Claim:
A method of evaluating the security of a target system by a security evaluation system, the method comprising: determining, at the security evaluation system, a plurality of security dimensions to be evaluated for the target system; determining a reference value for each of the plurality of security dimensions, wherein each reference value is representative of a target value for the associated security dimension of the target system; evaluating the security of the target system to generate an actual value for each of the plurality of security dimensions; generating a security index representation that displays the reference value and the actual value of each of the plurality of security dimensions for the target system; for each security dimension of the plurality of security dimensions: determining whether the actual value for the security dimension is less than a reference value for the security dimension, when the actual value for the security dimension is less than a reference value for the security dimension, determining a gap for the security dimension by determining the difference between the reference value for the security dimension and the actual value for the security dimension; and generation and displaying a gap summary, wherein the gap summary lists each gap.