Your company was hired by a small healthcare provider to perform a technician assessment on the network. What is the best approach for discovering vulnerabilities on a Windows-based computer?

Creating a disk image is a forensic or backup operation that captures system state but does not identify or enumerate vulnerabilities on a running host.

Windows Update applies patches to close known vulnerabilities but does not scan for, report on, or enumerate existing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Nessus is an industry-standard vulnerability scanner that performs authenticated or unauthenticated scans against Windows hosts, enumerating known CVEs, missing patches, and misconfigurations with severity-ranked results. Unlike passive references or OS-level update tools, it actively interrogates the live system. This makes it the appropriate choice for a technician-level vulnerability assessment.

MITRE CVE is a reference database of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities - it is a lookup resource, not a tool that actively tests or scans a live system.