Hi there,

I was interested about this subject before and I found the all the answers I needed in a free course on Coursera.com ... the course named "Software/Hardware Interface"... and another course would be usefull which is "Computer Secturity"... Hope it will help you and they are for free.

Best Regards

There is no straight forward answer , check OWASP top 10 , SANS Top 10 . Check CWE , CAPEC details on MITRE

Vulnerabilities are based on products/services you are running. There is no ALL IN ONE solution. You have to use scanners for this. OpenVAS is a good open source one. Also consult NSA hardening guides.

This may help.

Best Regards

http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/1587131625/samplechapter/1587131625content.pdf

when we use the sw and hw with multiple parameter including Internet applications and after analysing in depth  we find certain vulnerabilities.  I appreciate the ans of Ergys Rexhepi  OpenVas is agood open source,  pl. try it.

A came across a good paper recently (published on ACM also) examining zero-day attacks in software systems that may be useful.

Using data from publically available databases they examined metrics such as - % of vulnerabilities that are zero-day, the increase in attacks after public disclosure of vulnerabilities, how attackers typically exploit zero-day vulnerabilities.

http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~tdumitra/public_documents/bilge12_zero_day.pdf

While there is no direct or specific way to answer this, I would recommend at least 2 key steps, 1) visit OWASP's top 20 or at the very least their top 10, then depending on your actual infrastructure, ensure you find and read info. on hardening your environment. There are other steps that could be taken, however much of my answer would depend on myriad other factors, e.g. your budget, technical skill level of your resources, LOB, etc.

USER this is main answer.

I concur with the answers that there is no all-in-one solution.  Depending upon your infrastructure, the process of scanning/finding them could be relatively easy or very complex and hard.  Definitely look at OWASP's top 10.  Also, if you are actively programming in C/C++, take a look at the CERT C Secure Coding Standard. It talks about C's pitfalls and how to code around them.  You can get it as a book or you can look here: https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode/CERT+C+Coding+Standard

Furthermore, scanners are good, but they definitely have their limitations.  A human attacker is far more clever than a scanner.  Take this into account - especially when coding. Just because your code comes out clean from a scanner doesn't mean it is free from vulnerabilities that a human adversary will find.  

Here is a link to a study from 2006 where a large number of application bugs for open sources projects (Apache and Mozilla) were analysed to determine categories of root cause, impact and and other factors.

They categorised 3 causes of bugs:

1. Memory. Bugs caused by improper handling of memory objects.

2. Concurrency. Bugs that happen only in multi-threading (or multi-processes) environments such as data race, deadlock and synchronisation.

3. Semantic. Inconsistent with the original design requirements or the programmers intention.

Although they do consider "general" bugs they do consider vulnerabilites and provide some stats about what % of each categories vulnerabilities fall into.

Here is a version of the paper:

https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~lintan/publications/bugchar_asid06.pdf

Unfortunately I'm not  as familiar with hardware vulnerabiliities.

You can also check mobile Top 10 (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Projects/OWASP_Mobile_Security_Project_-_Top_Ten_Mobile_Risks), Cloud Top 10 (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Cloud_%E2%80%90_10_Project) and Privacy Top 10 (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Top_10_Privacy_Risks_Project) risk lists.

thanks all