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Interview question · Detection Engineering & Incident Response

You have 40,000 open vulnerabilities. How do you decide what to fix first, using CVSS, EPSS, KEV and your own context?

Sorting by CVSS score sends teams after thousands of 'criticals' nobody will ever exploit. The answer weighs whether exploitation is happening, whether the asset is reachable, and what it would cost you.

mediumEssentialNewPreparation tags: Amazon, Google, MicrosoftUpdated Nov 2026

Sorting by CVSS score sends teams after thousands of 'criticals' nobody will ever exploit. The answer weighs whether exploitation is happening, whether the asset is reachable, and what it would cost you.

Make your first attempt

What would you say before reading the answer?

  1. 01 State the assumptions your answer depends on.
  2. 02 Explain the mechanism and choose a control.
  3. 03 Name a condition that would change your decision.

The worked answer includes an approach, scoring criteria and follow-up questions. Compare the reasoning with your own.

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What if · the follow-ups in this answer

The answer works through 6 follow-ups like an interviewer would

You have 40,000 open vulnerabilities across servers, containers and laptops, and leadership wants the critical ones fixed within a week.

  1. Why is CVSS alone not enough?
  2. How do you judge exploitation?
  3. How do you judge reachability?
  4. How does asset value enter?
  5. What deadlines would you set?
  6. How would you prioritise the backlog?

Each rung has a nudge, a model answer, the principle that carries over and the weak answer to avoid. Premium opens every answer and ladder.

UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY
Next in this trackWhat is threat hunting, how do you run a hunt, and how do you know it was worth the time?Next in this trackHow do you triage a suspicious file safely, and how would you write a YARA rule that catches its family without false positives?Next in this trackDesign a security telemetry pipeline for millions of events per second that supports detection and survives an attacker.
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