What is the difference between a vulnerability and an exploit?

What is the purpose of doing a vulnerability assessment?

What exactly is the point of carrying out a vulnerability assessment?

One of the most basic concepts in the field of Information Security is the CIA Triad or CIA Triangle.  This was mentioned briefly in Chapter 1 of your text.  CIA stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.  Denial of Service (DoS) attacks challenge the "Availability" of a system or data.  This could be temporary (e.g., a SYN Flood Attack that renders a web server unavailable during the attack) or permanent (e.g., the deletion or destruction of the data).  The latter of these has become increasingly common in the case of "ransomware" which is malware that encrypts all of the data on an infected system and the administrator is notified that if they don't pay a ransom by a certain date that the key to decrypt the data will be permanently deleted.  (NOTE: This is conspicuously absent from the books discussion on malware but is a MAJOR issue right now.)  While the temporary attacks may be less destructive, they are often done against systems that generate a lot of money (such…