How is Severity Score Calculated
Aikido provides a contextual, risk-based severity score from 0 to 100, offering 10× more granularity than traditional CVSS scoring (which is on a 0–10 scale). This allows for better prioritization and filtering.
Critical
90 - 100
High
70 - 89
Medium
40 - 69
Low
1 - 39
1. Multiple Vulnerability Data Sources
We continuously monitor a variety of vulnerability feeds and databases, that provide baseline severity information and help establish initial severity scores. Databases include:
Public vulnerability databases (e.g., NVD, GHSA)
Operating system and vendor-specific advisories
Our own Aikido Intel: https://intel.aikido.dev/
2. Contextual Severity Adjustments
To reflect actual risk more accurately, Aikido layers in additional context such as exploitability, environment, threat intelligence, and custom rules.
Exploitability & Threat Intelligence:
Severity can increase when there’s evidence of real-world risk:
The vulnerability is actively exploited or appears on the CISA KEV list
A public PoC exploit is available (e.g., on GitHub)
Business Context
Severity is adjusted based on the importance of the affected asset. Some example are:
Production vs test environments
Backend vs frontend code
Whether the vulnerable code is reachable or executed
Customer Rules
You can further refine issue scoring by adding contextual information to your project
Learn how you can improve the risk score for repositories and containers here
Exploit Prediction (EPSS)
Aikido also supports EPSS-based prioritization to automatically downgrade or ignore vulnerabilities that are unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days. This is optional and turned off by default, more info here: Use EPSS values to further reduce noise
You can click the score to view a detailed breakdown of why this issue received this severity rating

Last updated
Was this helpful?