BLACK HAT USA 2019 – Las Vegas – Vulnerabilities happen. There's nothing new or mysterious about that. Neither is there mystery around the fact that something must be done to address vulnerabilities. But out of the thousands of common vulnerabilities and exploits (CVEs) discovered each year, which ones should receive a company's attention? That question — and a data-based answer — were the topic of a talk on Thursday at Black Hat USA.
The session, Predictive Vulnerability Scoring System, was presented by Michael Roytman, chief data scientist at Kenna Security, and Jay Jacobs, a security data scientist at Cyentia Institute. In it, they described vulnerability management as the "wicked problem" because management of vulnerability doesn't scale to the volume of vulnerabilities.
They pointed to the statistic that about 10% of vulnerabilities are patched each month, a percentage that doesn't change with the quantity of vulnerabilities exposed. There are too many vulnerabilities for any organization (or collection of organizations) to patch them all, so "we need a strategy to fix what matters."
The key to the strategy is figuring out "what matters." In theory, the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) should help: The higher the score, the greater the risk. Unfortunately, anything ranked 7 or above is considered critical, and, Roytman and Jacobs said, "CVSS is DoS-ing your patching policy and wasting your money."
The reason that the researchers say patching for all critical vulnerabilities amounts to a waste is that only 2% to 5% of critical vulnerabilities are ultimately found to be exploited in the wild. For greatest efficiency, then, a scoring system would take into account the factors that make it more likely a vulnerability will be exploited. That system is what the ..
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