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.
But... I spent a bunch of hours on that. For each one.
These days we just fix every reported vulnerable library, turns out that is far less work. And at some point we'd upgrade anyway so might as well.
Only if it causes problems (incompatible, regressions) then we look at it and analyze exploitability and make judgement calls. Over the last several years we've only had to do that for about 0.12% of the vulnerabilities we've handled.
Raising alarms on a CVE in Apache2 that only affects Windows when the server is Linux.
Or CVEs related to Bluetooth in cloud instances.
Yeah so 1) not running a web service 2) not parsing pdf in said non-existing service 3) congrats you are leaking memory on my dev laptop
I'm always curious about the companies that require vendors to report all instances where patches to CVSS 9.x vulnerabilities are not applied to all endpoints within 24 hours. Are they just absolutely flooded with reports, or does nobody on the vendor side actually follow these rules to the letter?
That sounds like a nigh-impossible requirement, as you've written it.
I suspect the actual requirement is much more limited in scope.
9.x vulnerability might not matter if the function gets trusted data while 3.x one can screw you if it is in bad spot
Yup. Almost every single time NVD came up with some ridiculously inflated numbers without any rhyme or reason. Every time I saw their evaluation it lowered my impression of them.
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.
"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