The critical role of CVEs in cybersecurity

CISO’S CORNER  On the battlefield of cybersecurity, one of our greatest tools often goes overlooked because of its simplicity: the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures system, better known as CVE. To those outside security leadership, a CVE may just seem like a catalog number, an entry in a database. But for those of us responsible for protecting critical infrastructure, sensitive data, and organizational resilience, CVEs are nothing less than the backbone of vulnerability management.

Today, the CVE system is managed by the MITRE Corporation, funded largely by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It offers a standard language and a common catalog to describe vulnerabilities across all platforms, systems, and industries. Without CVEs, every organization would be speaking a different language about security issues. Threat intelligence would fragment, remediation would slow, compliance reporting would become chaotic, and the coordinated defense of critical infrastructure would be nearly impossible.

However, in recent months, serious concerns have surfaced about the sustainability of the CVE program. Potential reductions in U.S. government funding have placed the entire CVE ecosystem at risk in the long run (even if the short-term threat has been averted). The implications for security leaders like me are profound—if the CVE system were to collapse, we would lose our central reference point for tracking and responding to vulnerabilities globally.

What would happen if the CVE system went dark?

From a CISO’s standpoint, the fallout would be immediate and severe. Without CVEs, vulnerability management programs would fracture almost overnight. Organizations would be forced to rely on proprietary naming conventions from vendors, researchers, and intelligence feeds. Standardization would disappear. Integrations between security scanners, SIEMs, SOAR platforms, and compliance tools, many of which hinge on CVE identifiers, would start to fail. Threat intelligence would become harder to digest and automate. A coordinated response between the government and the private sector would suffer. Even basic activities, like assessing patch priorities or proving vulnerability management maturity to auditors, would become significantly more expensive, slower, and less reliable.

The security community needs to be clear-eyed about this threat. If the CVE system ceases to function effectively, we will face not just technical inconvenience but also an increase in real-world risk. Organizations would be slower to patch critical systems, attackers would have more time to exploit known weaknesses, and defenders would struggle to communicate clearly both internally and externally. Ultimately, the risk to national security, economic stability, and public trust would rise substantially.

As a CISO, I believe we must prepare for a world where the continuity of the CVE program cannot be taken for granted. Ideally, governments should ensure long-term funding and oversight of CVE operations, recognizing its critical role in national cybersecurity strategy. We might consider an open-source governance model, allowing for transparent, community-driven database maintenance while enforcing strict quality control.

Regardless of the model chosen, what must be non-negotiable is the continuation of a free, authoritative, standardized global vulnerability catalog. Organizations should not be left vulnerable because of bureaucratic funding gaps or political inertia. CVEs are part of the critical infrastructure of cybersecurity itself.

CVEs are essential for cybersecurity response and visibility

Metrics tell the story even more starkly. The DBIR for 2025 notes that the median time until mass exploitation for a CISA KEV vulnerability is just five days. Meanwhile, the median time an organization for patch one such KEV vulnerability is 38 days—and this is the median, meaning that half the organizations take longer. This delta between disclosure and mitigation is already a gaping risk window. If CVE management were disrupted, that window would only widen, inviting greater attacks. Furthermore, while only a small percentage of CVEs are actively exploited (roughly 0.4 to 0.6% based on the NVD and KEV catalog), these vulnerabilities account for the vast majority of breaches and ransomware campaigns. Knowing which CVEs matter most and being able to prioritize them is a critical defense capability.

Within our own organizations, the responsibility for CVE tracking and response must clearly fall under cybersecurity leadership. Cyber threat teams must monitor CVE feeds in real time, vulnerability management teams must integrate findings into asset inventories and patch workflows, and IT operations must execute remediation actions—all while the CISO owns ultimate accountability for the strategy, governance, and risk acceptance decisions around vulnerability exposure.

Simply put: CVEs are not a side note to vulnerability management—they are the foundation. They are the common language that makes proactive defense possible in a chaotic threat landscape. 

Failure is not an option

As security leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure we are not caught unprepared. We must advocate for the preservation and modernization of the CVE system. We must also prepare contingency strategies should it falter. Above all, we must recognize that maintaining structured, standardized vulnerability intelligence is not just about compliance or efficiency. It is about ensuring that we can continue to protect our organizations, our economies, and our societies against an increasingly aggressive cyber threat environment.

The question isn’t whether we can afford to manage CVEs properly. It’s whether we can afford not to—because if we lose CVE, we lose a fundamental pillar of cybersecurity itself.