vuln-research

vuln-research is a skill for Claude Code from briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills. It costs 123 tokens per session (2,435 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for investigating a specific CVE, which is a publicly reported software security flaw. It checks affected versions, whether the vulnerable code can be reached, available exploits and patches, exposure time, and temporary mitigations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to research a CVE from authoritative advisories, assess whether your code is exposed, find patches or mitigations, and check whether attackers are actively exploiting it.
Why use it?
Having a vulnerable dependency does not always mean that an application can be attacked, so the actual code path and available fixes need separate review.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the cybersecurity-skills plugin — 28 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to research a CVE from authoritative advisories, assess whether your code is exposed, find patches or mitigations, and check whether attackers are actively exploiting it.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/vuln-research
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills --skill vuln-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cybersecurity-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for vuln-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/vuln-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/vuln-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/vuln-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/vuln-research/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for vuln-research

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/vuln-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/vuln-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 123 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,435 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00123 $0.02435
Opus 5 $0.00062 $0.01218
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00487
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00244

Measured 13d ago against content hash f3a1a6f9cc4a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vuln-research scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/vuln-research/SKILL.md · 197 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 197 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Vuln Research — CVE Deep-Dive and Applicability Assessment

When a CVE drops, the question isn't "do we have this package?" — dependency-audit answers that. The questions are:

  • Is the vulnerable code path actually invoked in our usage?
  • Is there a public proof-of-concept making this easy to exploit?
  • Is there a patch? When? What's our exposure window if we can't deploy in 24 hours?
  • If we can't patch, what's the mitigation?
  • Is CISA tracking it as actively exploited?

This skill walks that workflow end-to-end. Pairs with dependency-audit (which surfaces the CVE in the first place) and finding-triage (which closes the disposition loop).

Workflow

Step 1 — Pull the canonical sources

Start with the authoritative descriptions; everything downstream is summarized or sometimes wrong.

  • NVD recordhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-YYYY-NNNNN
  • Vendor advisory — search the vendor's security page; this is usually the most accurate description of which versions are affected and what the fix is
  • GitHub Security Advisoryhttps://github.com/advisories/GHSA-... (often more concise than NVD, sometimes has detail NVD lacks; check the parent project's security tab)
  • CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities cataloghttps://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog. If the CVE is here, treat as actively exploited — patch within CISA's stated due date
  • EPSS scorehttps://www.first.org/epss/ — Exploit Prediction Scoring System; a 30-day probability of exploitation. Useful tiebreaker between high-CVSS-low-EPSS vs medium-CVSS-high-EPSS

Step 2 — Confirm affected versions

Vendor advisories sometimes hedge ("affects versions before X"); pin down the exact range.

  • Check the vendor's release notes and the commit history of the fix
  • For OSS projects: find the patch commit (usually mentioned in the advisory) and run git tag --contains <commit> to see which releases include the fix
  • For closed-source: the advisory is the only source — verify version comparisons carefully (semver isn't always observed)
  • For monorepos / re-publishers: confirm the same fix landed in any forks or distributions you depend on

Read the full file on GitHub · 197 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 13d ago First seen · 197 lines · 123 tokens per session scan A f3a1a6f9cc4a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vuln-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills (391 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 123 tokens to every session and 2,435 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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