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

Windows Update only identifies and remediates missing Microsoft patches; it does not scan for third-party software vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, open ports, or other security weaknesses that a full vulnerability assessment requires.

Nessus is a purpose-built vulnerability scanner that actively interrogates a target system, comparing its configuration, installed software, and patch level against a continuously updated database of known CVEs and misconfigurations. It produces a prioritized report of discovered vulnerabilities, making it the industry-standard choice for technical security assessments. This approach satisfies the 'discovery' requirement far more comprehensively than any passive or manual method.

Checking MITRE's CVE list provides a reference database of publicly known vulnerabilities but does not actively probe or assess whether a specific Windows machine is actually affected by any of those vulnerabilities.

Creating a disk image of a clean Windows installation is a baseline or forensic preservation technique and provides no mechanism for identifying vulnerabilities present on the target system being assessed.