CVE Enrichment Seems to Have Stopped

David Bressler

Since February 12th, it appears that there is a significant drop in CVE enrichment data on the national vulnerability database (NVD). This is problematic because a lot of organizations that rely on CVEs to drive their network vulnerability management strategies are now making decisions with less information than they could depend on in the past.

National Vulnerability Database Enrichment

The primary role of the NVD is adding data to vulnerabilities, data such as severity levels (CVSS scoring) and CWEs. And, NVD is responsible for maintaining the CVEs as information changes. For example, when first released there might not be a fix for a CVE, but over time as vendors patch their systems, the recommended fix would need to be updated. Here’s a good primer on understanding CVEs and all the data they contain.

BackBox AI-Based Enrichment

Here at BackBox we’re focused solely on network vulnerabilities. Fortunately though, this problem doesn’t impact us. Most exposure management tools rely on the NVD. BackBox Network Vulnerability Manager (NVM) leverages our AI-based technology to gather and analyze security information directly from vendor advisories, ensuring unparalleled accuracy and timeliness as compared to other solutions, including the NVD.

This means that our vulnerability intelligence feed is always kept up to date with the latest context about the CVEs themselves. This context is used to score devices and networks, a risk score that represents the vulnerability state of the network. The risk score takes into account lots of information beyond the CVE, for example, including whether a device is internet-facing or not. It’s the risk score and the AI / machine learning around it that makes BackBox NVM a powerful tool to protect enterprise networks.

What’s Really Going On?

Reading around it seems there’s something deeper going on with the NVD consortium and NIST. However it works itself out, BackBox Network Vulnerability Management (NVM) customers can rest assured that their vulnerability feed contains more than raw CVE data.

Learn more about BackBox NVM in our solution brief.