U.S. Government Supercharges Security Vulnerabilities

Although there’s not much confusion regarding what a security vulnerability is, a flaw that can be exploited in order to do something malicious that shouldn’t be doable, the same cannot be said about vulnrichment. I have to admit that, even as a cybersecurity veteran with more than three decades of experience under my belt, this was a new one on me. I must have missed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency memo that introduced the idea in May 2024. Now America’s self-proclaimed cyber defense agency, which operates as part of the Department of Homeland Security, has seen fit to try and explain it again. Let’s hope you are strapped in, this could be quite the ride.

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What Has Vulnrichment Got To Do With Better Security?

OK, so CISA wants you to know about its vulnrichment initiative, but what is it, and why is it so important to your organization that the U.S. government is getting involved? According to my old acquaintance Tod Beardsley, the CISA vulnerability response section chief, as well as being someone who understands more about such things than most anyone I know, vulnrichment is a “dynamic resource to help level up your vulnerability management program.” Let’s explore that a little further.

Staying ahead of attackers and staying ahead of vulnerabilities is an essential race against time being played out day after day in organizations up and down the country. On a daily basis, new vulnerabilities are disclosed using the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures system, better known as CVEs. Many of these will be critical in nature, but knowing that a CVE exists is not the same as knowing if it needs to be dealt with immediately, if at all.

“As cybersecurity practitioners, researchers, and defenders, we need context,” Beardsley said in a Jan. 21 CISA announcement; “We need clarity, and most importantly, we need actionable insights that can help prioritize patching efforts and mitigate risks.”

Say hello to vulnrichment, the CISA initiative to supercharge CVE data with context, scoring, and analysis that go beyond the basics.

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Security Vulnerability Management On Steroids

Aimed at all IT defenders, vulnerability managers, security professionals and any business that takes security seriously, the vulnrichment project was launched on May. 10, 2024 and can best be described as enriching the basic CVE data to bring truly actionable insights to the patching party. “Actionable insights,” Beardsley said, such as “Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC) decision points, Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) IDs, and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), all bundled into the CVE records you’re already pulling.” From a defender’s point of view the best thing is that it doesn’t actually require anything new as the “enriched data is automatically baked into the CVE feeds you’re already using.”

All you need to do, it would appear, is “parse it out.” Beardsley used the example of CVE-2023-45727 which already has a fully populated Authorized Data Publisher container. “Let’s say you wanted to query the Exploitation field of the CISA-provided Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization decision points,” Beardsley said; “You’d iterate over the ADP container, look for the Vulnrichment ADP container, look for the SSVC decision point, and then return the value for exploitation.”

I’d recommend reading the CISA documentation surrounding vulnrichment to get to grips with how it can help your organization, but the bottom line has to be anything that adds content and clarity to vulnerability management has to be a security positive.

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