Construct · 6 fields · 15 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningfragilitycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to vulnerability is fragility.
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A flaw in software, hardware, or configuration that an attacker can use to violate a system's security policy. The construct became a catalogue when MITRE's Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures list gave each disclosed flaw an identifier, and a score when Mell, Scarfone, and Romanosky described the Common Vulnerability Scoring System in 2006; FIRST's v3.1 specification fixes the base metrics (attack vector, complexity, privileges required, user interaction, and impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability) that produce a number from 0 to 10. Shahzad, Shafiq, and Liu's 2012 analysis of tens of thousands of database entries traced the life cycle from disclosure to patch to exploit. What distinguishes this meaning is that the vulnerability belongs to the artefact, not the victim, and it exists whether or not anyone is at risk.[1][2][3]
The likelihood that a household, firm, or financial system will fail to meet its obligations when conditions turn. Minsky's 1992 statement of the financial instability hypothesis put it at the level of the system: in good times units migrate from hedge finance, where income covers debt, to speculative and Ponzi positions, so stability itself breeds the fragility that precedes a crisis. At the level of the household, Anderloni, Bacchiocchi, and Vandone built a 2012 indicator from arrears, debt burden, and the ability to absorb an unexpected expense, and showed which household characteristics predict it. What distinguishes this meaning is that vulnerability is a balance-sheet position, and it rises without any external hazard changing.[4][5]
A heightened claim to protection from harm or exploitation in research and care. The Belmont Report fixed the regulatory meaning in 1979 by naming groups (children, prisoners, the institutionalised, the economically disadvantaged) whose dependent status or compromised capacity to consent made them easy to select as subjects. Hurst argued in 2008 that the list approach fails and proposed a definition: an identifiably increased likelihood of incurring additional or greater wrong. Luna went further in 2009, replacing labels with layers that a person acquires and sheds with circumstances, so that vulnerability is something a woman in a poor country may have several of at once and none of at home. What distinguishes this meaning is that vulnerability generates a duty in someone else.[6][7][8]
A stable characteristic that raises the probability of disorder when stress arrives. Abramson, Metalsky, and Alloy's 1989 hopelessness theory named a specific cognitive vulnerability (the tendency to infer stable, global causes and negative consequences from bad events) that combines with a negative event to produce a subtype of depression. Monroe and Simons reviewed the diathesis–stress logic in 1991 and showed that most models had never specified how the two components interact. A second and newer usage runs in the other direction: Brown's 2006 grounded theory of shame resilience found that women who could stay open about their imperfection, the state she later popularised as vulnerability, were the ones who recovered from shame. What distinguishes this meaning is that vulnerability is a trait of the person that interacts with events, and in the resilience literature it is a capacity rather than a defect.[9][10][11]
The characteristics of a person or community that shape their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from a hazard. Wisner, Blaikie, Cannon, and Davis fixed the political-economy version in At Risk: disasters happen where a natural hazard meets people whose root causes and dynamic pressures have placed them in unsafe conditions, so the vulnerability is produced by society and not by the storm. Cutter, Boruff, and Shirley made it a county-level number in 2003 with the Social Vulnerability Index, a factor score built from census variables on wealth, age, race, housing, and employment. What distinguishes this meaning is that vulnerability is a property of the population before the hazard, and it is what turns a hazard into a disaster.[12][13]
The degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change. The IPCC's formula of the 2000s decomposed it into exposure to a stress, sensitivity to that stress, and adaptive capacity to adjust. Adger's 2006 review traced the construct's two parents (the hazards school and the entitlements school of famine research) and argued that vulnerability and resilience are linked through the same dynamics of exposure and coping. Füssel showed in 2007 that the word carries at least four attributes in every use (the system, its attribute of concern, the hazard, and the time horizon) and that most disagreements dissolve once those are named. What distinguishes this meaning is that vulnerability is an integrated outcome of the system and the stressor together, so the same community is vulnerable to drought and not to sea-level rise.[14][15]
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