US Patent 8683598 Mechanism to evaluate the security posture of a computer system

A mechanism for evaluating the security posture of a computer system is described. In one embodiment, a method includes receiving data representing an event associated with a security component operating in an endpoint device, analyzing the received data to determine a score to assign to the event and a weighting factor to apply to the assigned score, updating a security component score of the security component with the assigned weighted score for the event, updating an overall security score for the endpoint device with the updated security component score, and providing the updated overall security score to an analysis component.