When reviewing the latest vulnerability assessment report, you notice the previously identified and critical SQL injection vulnerability in one of your web applications is no longer listed. Prior to this assessment, there were no changes to the application's code, and no patches have been deployed. Considering this scenario, what is the MOST likely explanation?
The vulnerability was a false positive in previous reports and has been correctly omitted now.
The application code has self-corrected due to adaptive security algorithms.
The scanner experienced a false negative, failing to detect the existing vulnerability.
The development team silently patched the vulnerability without documentation.
In this scenario, the most likely explanation is that the vulnerability scanner failed to detect an existing vulnerability during the latest scan. This represents a false negative, which can occur due to scanner misconfiguration, updated scanning algorithms that inadvertently miss certain vulnerabilities, or network issues during scanning. It is important to investigate such occurrences thoroughly to ensure critical vulnerabilities are not being missed.
The other options provided might seem plausible but are less likely given there were no changes or updates to the application or the environment that could account for the vulnerability being fixed or becoming undetectable.
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