Patent Document ID: 9692778
Application ID: 14538599

Base Claim:
1. A method for prioritizing vulnerabilities of a specific asset deployed by an organization in a specific virtual computing environment, performed by a processor-based contextual vulnerabilities prioritization system, comprising: determining a vulnerability score for the specific asset, based on a CVSS (common vulnerability scoring system) score or other base vulnerability score or temporal vulnerability score, wherein the specific asset is a virtual machine or virtual application that is implemented using physical computing components in the specific virtual computing environment; receiving information about a threat; correlating the information about the threat with information about the specific asset based upon environmental factors of the specific asset to determine a threat score for the specific asset, wherein the environmental factors include characteristics of a customer associated with the specific asset, characteristics of the specific asset relative to the threat, and characteristics of a workload distribution relative to the threat; determining a contextual score for the specific asset based on at least one tag of the specific asset; and deriving a prioritization score for the specific asset, the prioritization score a combination of the vulnerability score, the threat score and the contextual score, the prioritization score representing a prioritizing, specific to the specific asset, of a context-dependent vulnerability of the specific asset to the threat.

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Claim 3:
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein: the vulnerability score assesses vulnerability of the specific asset relative to threats in general and relative to a specific vulnerability; the threat score assesses vulnerability of the specific asset to the threat, relative to the specific vulnerability; and the contextual score assesses a workload context of the specific asset relative to static aspects of the specific asset, from at least one static tag, and relative to security events, from at least one dynamic tag.