Tag: CVSS
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Squirrel Goes Down the Rabbit Hole … Podcast
On November 17, I joined the three hosts of the Down the Security Rabbithole (DtSR) podcast to talk about CVSS, CVE, and how they play into risk and defending networks. My time followed Robert “RSnake” Hansen’s podcast where he had a pretty controversial take on risk management. One of the hosts, Rafal Los, asked my…
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VulnCon Day 2 Errata & Taking Ben Edwards to Task
[4/13/2025 Update: See very end, below last image, for an amusing update.][2/19/2026 Update: See very very end for an amusing update, yet positive!] Today was the second day of VulnCon 2025, a conference whose stated purpose is “to collaborate with various vulnerability management and cybersecurity professionals to develop forward leaning ideas that can be taken…
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Log4Shell: Redefining Painful Disclosure
Log4Shell is yet another example of why we simply don’t get security right, and it strongly suggests there is little hope for change. There are plenty of blogs and articles that do a great analysis of the vulnerability from the exploitation and impact angle of this vulnerability. There are a lot fewer that examine why…
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A critique of the summary of “Latent Feature Vulnerability Rankings of CVSS Vectors”
Update: Corren McCoy has written a wonderful response to this blog where she goes into more detail about her conclusions as well as citing more portions of the original research that led to her conclusions. As she notes, there are several layers of condensing the original research at play here, which can dilute and distort…
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More authorities, more CVEs; Oh, and more commentary.
On November 10, TechBeacon published a great article by Rob Lemos titled “More authorities, more CVEs: What it means for app sec teams” in which I was quoted, along with several other people. Like many articles of this nature, those who provide input often will talk for as long as half an hour and ultimately…
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Why Anaconda INC Doesn’t Fully Understand CVEs
It’s worrisome that in 2020 we still have people in influential technical roles that don’t understand CVE. A friend told me earlier this year he was in a meeting where someone said that CVE IDs are assigned in order, so CVE-2020-9500 meant there were 9500 vulns in 2020 so far. Of course that is not…
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The problem with SCADA goes deeper…
[This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] We know SCADA is virtual swiss cheese, ready to be owned if someone can reach a device. We have preached airgaps for decades, even before we knew how bad the software was. Back then it was just, “this is so critical, it has to be separate!” The…
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Mobile Devices and Exploit Vector Absurdity
[This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] The last few days has seen several vulnerabilities disclosed that include serious gaps in logic with regard to exploitation vectors. What is being called “remote” is not. What is being called “critical” is not. Here are a few examples to highlight the problem. We beg of you,…
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CVSSv2 Shortcomings, Faults, and Failures Formulation
[This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] The Open Security Foundation (OSF) and Risk Based Security wrote an open letter to FIRST regarding the upcoming Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) version 3 proposal. While we were not formally asked to provide input, given the expertise of managing vulnerability databases, along with the daily use…
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Advisories != Vulnerabilities, and How It Affects Statistics
[This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.] I’ve written about the various problems with generating vulnerability statistics in the past. There are countless factors that contribute to, or skew vulnerability stats. This is an ongoing problem for many reasons. First, important numbers are thrown around in the media and taken as gospel, creating varying…