Tag: Vulnerability Statistics
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Will the Real 300,000 Stand Up?
On September 27, 2022, Flashpoint’s VulnDB hit the 300,000th entry added to the database. Think about that and .. wow. I started the adventure of collecting vulnerabilities around 1993, back when it was all flat text files, and my hacker group used a FILES.BBS file as an index, pointing to many hundreds of other text…
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Microsoft SIR and Vulnerability Statistics
[I wrote this for my day job back in February, 2017, but it never got posted. Including it here for reference.] The notion of expertise in any field is fascinating. It crosses so many aspects of humans and our perception. For example, two people in the same discipline, each with the highest honors academic can…
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Let’s Talk About 0-days
[This was a first draft of an article to be published on the Flashpoint Threat Intel blog. Ultimately, parts of it were adopted for a different blog but the original remains considerably different. Curtis Kang contributed significantly to the finished blog below.] Zero-days (0-days and other variations) are exploitable vulnerabilities that the general public is…
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Privasec’s Ridiculous Claim of a “World Record” in Vulnerability Disclosure
On May 9, 2019, Privasec published an odd press release with a URL slug of “privasec-queensland-telstra-acquisition” but a title of “Privasec Red’s Consultant Breaks World Record By Disclosing Most Number Of Open-Source CVEs.” This claim is simply wrong. To believe it requires either a complete understanding of the vulnerability disclosure landscape or intent to deceive.…
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Commentary on Trend Micro’s Linux Threat Report 2021
On August 23, 2021, Trend Micro released a report titled “Linux Threat Report 2021 1H” by Magno Logan and Pawan Kinger. The report is based on Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network (SPN) which they call “the data lake for all detections across all Trend Micro’s products“. Basically, every security product they make that detects vulnerabilities…
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Perlroth and the History of Microsoft Vulns
While reading “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends“, early in the book I ran across a single line that made me double-take. I took a note to revisit it after a complete read since it was so early in the book. For those familiar with my blogs, I tend to write about…
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The Rundown: CVE IDs, Meanings, & Assumptions
For almost two decades, CVE has been considered an industry standard for vulnerability tracking. A CVE ID can be affiliated with many vulnerabilities, in a format like CVE-2014-54321. Note my choice in ID, from 2014 with a consecutive set of numbers. That is because I specifically chose a ‘sample’ CVE that was set aside as…
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The Value of Backfilling
[This was originally published on RiskBasedSecurity.com.] In every quarterly Vulnerability QuickView Report, we include a chart that shows how many vulnerabilities were disclosed so far that year, along with the most current counts of prior periods to show relative growth and decline. In some cases, like this year’s Q1, that chart shows a decline compared…
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Thoughts on 0-days and Risk in 2020
[Stupid WordPress. This was scheduled to publish Nov 23 but didn’t for some reason. Here it is, a bit late…] On Friday, Maddie Stone from the Google P0 team Tweeted about the 0-day exploits her team tracks. As someone who checks that sheet weekly and tracks vulnerabilities, including ones ‘discovered in the wild’, this is…
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Vulnerability Counts Are a Moving Target
At the end of each year, we see articles covering how many vulnerabilities were disclosed the prior year. Because the articles are written about the same time of year, it gives a fairly good initial comparison from year to year; at least, on the surface. This is the foundation of statements such as “Security vulnerabilities…