NIST gives up enriching most CVEs

It is true but the reverse is also true. It may be very hard for an external body to issue proper scoring and narrative for bugs in thousands of various software packages. Some bugs are easy, like if you get instant root on a Unix system by typing "please give me root", then it's probably a high severity issue. But a lot of bugs are not simple and require a lot of deep product knowledge and understanding of the system to properly grade. The knowledge that is frequently not widely available outside of the organization. And, for example, assigning panic scores to issues that are very niche and theoretical, and do not affect most users at all, may also be counter-productive and lead to massive waste of time and resources.

Long story short, the reports were things like “If your program gets this weird packet, it takes a little longer than usual to free resources”. There was one supposed “packet of death” report which I took seriously enough to spend an afternoon writing a test case for; I couldn’t reproduce the bug and the tester realized their test setup was broken.

There seems to be a lot of pressure for people to get status by claiming they broke some old open source project, to the point people like me are getting pulled out of retirement to look at issues which are trivial.

For a very long time the security world has basically given up on defense and relies on prioritizing cves. This is wrong on so many different levels.

a) You can't scan for things you don't know that exist.

b) Malware, like all the supply chain issues in the past few months don't have cves to begin with but they are still massive security issues. That is to say the cves themselves don't really address everything. So you end up with IOCs but those are also totally worthless if it's the first time you are seeing something. You have to have proactive defense if you actually care.

c) There are quite a few cwes that you can outright prevent through various defensive means but for whatever reason organizations won't. This is an organizational issue - not a technical one. This might be one of the main benefits of the cve program in that it starts to penalize organizations through insurance and other means by tracking it and this is exactly how a lot of the security world operates.

I'm cautiously optimistic that the world is going to start looking at stronger proactive defensive measures rather than relying on this reactive scanning approach.

"Enrichment" apparently is their term for adding detailed information about bugs to the CVE database.

CVSS (risk) is already well handled by other sources, but CPE (what software is affected) is kind of critical. I don't even know how they're going to focus enrichment on software the government uses without knowing what software the CVEs are in.

Maybe not in english or smth

Majority of researchers dont care how important the bug is, everyone wants something to put on CV, they get paid extra by companies to finding bugs in SAP or SalesForce that will never ever ever be used for anything.

Pointless moot just to generate noice. Like 90% of whole infosec sector.

At least thats what I understood from discussions with someone who has many nations security at stake at work.

Now - I am not saying I disagree with everything here, mind you; I guess everyone may agree that CVEs may range in severity. But then the question also is ... what is the point of an organisation that is cut down to, say, handle 1% of CVEs - and ignore the rest? Why have such an organisation then to begin with?

I don't have enough data to conclude anything, but from a superficial glance it kind of seems like trying to cut down on standards or efficiency.