Build Series Vol. 03 — Vulnerability Management

Finding what is exploitable, fixing what matters, and proving both — with a prioritisation model that still works when the severity score is missing.

The decision this volume is really about: prioritising on exploitation evidence and your own asset context, with CVSS demoted to a tiebreaker.

Control mapping first. The exact SOC 2, ISO 27001:2022, NIST CSF 2.0, CIS v8.1, CMMC, PCI DSS v4.0.1 and HIPAA clauses this build satisfies are printed before any installation step, so the work becomes audit evidence rather than a side effect of it.

A validation harness, not just a build. How to prove the control works and — the part nothing free covers — how to catch it failing quietly: the expired scan credential, the canary that stopped, the encryption key nobody can recover, the segmentation your diagram claims and your firewall does not.

Three sized architectures with honest hour counts. Tier 1 is 20–35 hrs to build · 6–10 hrs a month.

Stack: OpenVAS CE · Nuclei · Trivy · DefectDojo · CISA KEV · EPSS.

Current as of August 2026. NIST stopped enriching most CVEs on 15 April 2026 — everything unenriched before 1 March 2026 moved to "Not Scheduled". Any workflow that quietly assumed NVD-supplied CVSS now has a hole in it, and most teams have not noticed because the scanner still prints a number.

Every volume runs the same nine sections: prerequisites, control mapping, the decisions that matter, three sized architectures, a build runbook, a validation harness, an evidence pack, an operating cadence with honest hour counts, failure modes and the buy line, and an AI prompt pack.

Reading order: read 5th of ten. Each volume stands alone, and each is cheaper to build if the one before it exists.

Ships without support. This is a document, not a service contract — and Section 8 tells you plainly where the buy line is.