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lucideertoday at 12:22 PM1 replyview on HN

I've been in such an org, & I've led initiatives to set up automated detection at very large scale. We started by issuing tickets to teams to resolve CVEs within varying timelines - ranging from a 24hr fix to 6 months - connected to the CVSS score. It wasn't viable.

- Firstly, you quickly realise how irrelevant CVSS scores are - initiatives like First's EPSS are designed to fix this but they aren't there yet

- Secondly, you need to begin implementing localised heuristics to determine exploitable code paths. This has generally been incredibly difficult to do reliably - LLMs have started to make it easier, but it's expensive.

- Lastly, you need to factor in consideration of actionable remediation pathways. A dependency upgrade for critical infrastructure might contain breaking changes that take months to fix, or two competing CVEs might be present in interdependent versions of transitive dependencies in your sbom tree.

Most orgs aren't applying any of the above three filters to reduce their CVE remediation burden, & even if they are, it's still too high to make zero a viable target.

In reality, most orgs aren't doing comprehensive detection to begin with - if you haven't discovered all of your CVEs, your remediation burden is going to be a lot more manageable.


Replies

mr_mitmtoday at 12:37 PM

> - Firstly, you quickly realise how irrelevant CVSS scores are

Even if you factor in the environmental score? I realize it's a lot more work, but it basically allows you to tune the score to get any value you want.

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