Skip to main content

Severity levels in findings

Understand the severity levels set by Snyk API & Web to classify findings of target scans.

Ana Pascoal avatar
Written by Ana Pascoal
Updated over a month ago

Snyk API & Web sets a severity level for each finding to sum up its overall risk based on the following:

  • The likelihood of the vulnerability being found and exploited.

  • The skills required to exploit the vulnerability.

  • And the impact of exploiting the vulnerability.

For example, a vulnerability that is easy to find, easy to exploit, and with a high impact will likely be classified with a high severity.

Different findings for the same vulnerability can have different severity levels depending on the context in which Snyk API & Web finds the vulnerabilities. Multiple factors can influence this context, which Snyk API & Web takes into consideration to lower or raise the severity level. For example, the severity of a finding can be higher or lower depending on whether the scanned website or application has authentication.

The following table describes the different severity levels:

Severity

Description

Examples

These findings may have a direct impact on the application security, either clients or service owners, for instance, by granting the attacker access to sensitive information.

- SQL Injection

- OS Command Injection

Medium findings don't usually have an immediate impact alone, but combined with other findings, may lead to a successful compromise of the application.

- Cross-site Request Forgery

- Unencrypted Communications

Findings where either the exploit is not trivial, or the finding cannot be exploited by itself.

- Directory Listing

- Clickjacking

To learn more about findings, read this article on how to interpret target scan results.

Did this answer your question?