Skip to main content

Understanding Vulnerability Status: Open, Dismissed, and Closed

Vulnerabilities have three states, not two — knowing the difference between Dismissed and Closed avoids the most common confusion here.

Written by Upendra Varma

Manage → Security → Vulnerabilities pulls findings from your connected scanners (like Aikido) into one list. The Status column has three possible values, and mixing up the last two is the most common source of confusion:

  • Open — actively present, not yet addressed.

  • Dismissed — a human decision. You've reviewed it and accepted the risk, or determined it doesn't apply, and said so explicitly (with a required note).

  • Closed — a system decision. The connected scanner confirmed it's actually been remediated. You never set this manually.

In short: Dismissed means "I accept this risk," Closed means "it's actually fixed." They can look similar in a quick glance at the table, but they mean very different things — a Dismissed vulnerability is still technically present, just accepted; a Closed one is genuinely gone.

Dismissing a vulnerability

Open the vulnerability and dismiss it with a note explaining why (e.g. "false positive," "compensating control in place," "accepted risk, low severity"). This moves it out of your Open counts, but it's still visible under a dismissed filter for audit purposes — dismissing isn't deleting.

SLA tracking

Each severity level (Critical/High/Medium/Low) has a remediation SLA in days, configurable under Edit SLAs. The "Open (SLA Missed)" tab is your worklist of anything overdue against its own severity's deadline — changing an SLA setting only affects the deadline going forward, not vulnerabilities already tracked against the old one.

Re-syncing

Sync Now pulls fresh results from your connected scanner. Note that the table doesn't auto-refresh after a sync completes — give it a moment and refresh the page to see updated results.

Did this answer your question?