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CISA Weekly Bulletins FOIA Results
Did you know that CISA publishes a weekly bulletin of “new vulnerabilities”, and has for a long time? They tend to have anywhere from 350 up to almost 1,000 vulnerabilities depending on the volume of CVEs published. The bulletins are entirely based on CVE IDs being published, not when the disclosures happened (just like CVE…
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Don’t Be a CVE Dummy
One of the aspects of vulnerability intelligence is monitoring various public sources for new vulnerabilities, especially ones with a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) ID. These numbers are designed to help communicate details about a specific vulnerability. “Hey, remember that remote code execution in Fortinet in May?” Unfortunately, that isn’t very specific as there were…
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Was It Really GPAC? (No!) Getting a CVE Removed from CISA KEV
On October 3, 2024, Aquasec published a report about newly discovered malware named “perfctl”, targeting Linux servers. In it they cite the malware taking advantage of misconfigurations, as well as attempting to “exploit the Polkit vulnerability (CVE-2021-4043) to escalate privileges.” Only problem is that CVE-2021-4043 isn’t “the Polkit vulnerability”, which in itself is problematic since…
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Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Thoughts – Part Two
This is part two of my thoughts on Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV), and where it gets a lot more interesting! Please see the first blog before starting here. Automation / Eagerness To Add Reading vulnerability disclosures can be a grueling mission full of frustrations. Poorly written advisories, missing technical details, and errors make the life…
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Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Thoughts – Part One
This is the first of two blogs with my thoughts on Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) tracking and the challenges that come with tracking them. Introduction On November 03, 2021, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced a Binding Operational Directives (BOD) titled “BOD 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities“. This BOD established…
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How to Steal an Election (Taylor’s Version)
Disclaimer: This blog is not about politics in the sense of party affiliations and I am not making a political statement. Further, I am not interested in hearing your views on one party or the other. Rather, this blog is just a thought experiment on manipulating an election. This general idea is not new by…
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2024 NIST / ANALYGENCE FOIA Results
On June 5, 2024, I sent a FOIA request to National Institute of Standards and Technology requesting a copy of the contract between the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and ANALYGENCE, a contractor that had been retained to help with the NVD backlog. This was one of two trying to determine how much the U.S. Government…
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Vulnerability Forecasting Technical Colloquium – A Few Thoughts
[I wrote this on September 21st, but apparently forgot to ultimately move from GDoc to Blog. I suspect because it really needs to be cleaned up as it is my first draft. Rather than do that, since the event has passed, I will just backdate instead. This blog was actually published December 28, 2024.] Part…
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Squirrel With a Gun … and Crashes
As many know, I have eagerly been awaiting the game Squirrel With a Gun for quite a while. I even have the SWaG plushie! So imagine my disappointment when I try to play and run into… needing to install Microsoft Visual C++ (which requires a reboot… in 2024). None of the other steam games require…
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400 CNAs, Yay?
Introduction This week, or in the next two, we’re likely to see MITRE heralding the milestone of minting their 400th CVE Numbering Authority (CNA). These are, primarily, organizations that can assign a CVE ID without having to go to MITRE each time to obtain the ID. This is part of what MITRE calls a “federated”…