A CVE Program in Limbo: Why It’s Time to Rethink Vulnerability Detection

On April 15, 2025, MITRE issued a letter to members of the CVE Board warning of a potentially significant disruption to the global vulnerability intelligence infrastructure. The contract that enables MITRE to operate and modernize the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program was saved in a last minute funding extension late in the evening on April 15. While these efforts are applauded by the security community it does highlight that, even a brief interruption in a security advisory program could ripple across the entire cybersecurity ecosystem.

This development highlights a critical truth: the world has become overly dependent on a single vulnerability catalog to drive detection, coordination, and remediation efforts. A disruption of this magnitude calls into question whether traditional methods of identifying and tracking threats are resilient enough for today’s evolving risk landscape.

Why the CVE System Matters and What Happens If It Falters

The CVE system is foundational to many of the tools and processes cybersecurity professionals use every day. It supports:

• Timely publication of vulnerability disclosures
• Coordination between researchers, vendors, and responders
• Threat intelligence feeds and national databases like the NVD
• Patch management and vulnerability prioritization workflows

A break in this chain could result in delayed disclosures, incomplete intelligence, and a disruption in automated response across third-party tools that rely on CVE identifiers.

Just as importantly, a gap in CVE support could hinder visibility into unmanaged, operational, or specialized devices such as those in healthcare or critical infrastructure, where vulnerabilities often go undetected until they’re actively exploited.

The Need for a Broader, More Resilient Approach

This moment serves as a stark reminder that threat detection strategies must evolve beyond traditional CVE-based models. While the CVE system remains a valuable public resource, it is not the only or even the fastest mechanism for identifying and understanding risk.

Modern detection and response should incorporate:

• Multiple sources of threat intelligence, including private research, deception technology (that often leverages AI), and dark web monitoring
• Behavioral analysis and anomaly detection that identifies threats based on activity, not identifiers
• Contextual risk scoring that considers asset criticality, exploitability, and business impact
• Global telemetry and real-world signals that rely on cross collaboration of the wider security community and can reveal emerging attack trends early

Such an approach ensures that even in the absence of formal disclosures, organizations can maintain awareness and act quickly when new vulnerabilities or exploits arise.

Early Warning Detection: A Critical Safeguard

The concept of early warning detection or surfacing threats before they are formally disclosed has become essential. By using AI/ML and behavioral analytics to identify anomalous activity, these systems can detect potential exploits weeks or even months before an official CVE is published. This capability is particularly important when visibility into certain device categories is limited or when attacker techniques evolve too rapidly for public disclosure pipelines to keep up; or if they cease to operate as expected.

In the event of a CVE system interruption, early warning mechanisms provide an alternative signal, enabling organizations to continue monitoring, prioritizing, and responding to threats based on current behaviors and emerging patterns, not just historical labels.

What Security Leaders Should Do Now

The potential CVE disruption may or may not materialize, but this can be labeled as the “canary in the proverbial coalmine”. The risk it represents is real. Security leaders should take this opportunity to reassess their vulnerability management posture and ask:

• Are we solely or heavily dependent on CVE IDs to detect and act on threats?
• Can we identify and prioritize risks without waiting for formal disclosures?
• Are we equipped to monitor, contextualize, prioritize and respond to emerging threats in real time?
• Do we understand which assets are most critical, and how their compromise would affect operations?

Conclusion

The uncertainty surrounding the CVE program is a call to action. It underscores the need for a broader, more adaptive approach to vulnerability detection which embraces collaboration of the larger security community, behavioral signals, early warning technologies, asset context, and multiple threat sources.

The future of cybersecurity depends on resilience: not just in systems and processes, but in how we detect, interpret, and act on risk. As defenders, we must evolve beyond reliance on single points of failure and move toward an intelligence ecosystem that’s as dynamic and distributed as the threats we face.

Now is the time to evaluate whether your vulnerability detection capabilities are future-ready. Are you prepared to stay ahead, even if the next threat doesn’t come with a CVE attached?