Every information security practitioner knows that patching vulnerabilities is one of the first steps towards a healthy and well-maintained organization. But with thousands of vulnerabilities disclosed each year and media hype about the newest “branded” vulnerability on the news, it’s hard to know where to start.
The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) considers a range of factors that are fed into an automated process to arrive at a score for CVSSv3. Mandiant Threat Intelligence takes a different approach, drawing on the insight and experience of our analysts. This human input allows for qualitative factors to be taken into consideration, which gives additional focus to what matters to security operations.
We consider critical vulnerabilities to pose significant security risks and strongly suggest that remediation steps are taken to address them as soon as possible. We also believe that limiting ‘critical’ and ‘high’ designations helps security teams to effectively focus attention on the most dangerous vulnerabilities. For instance, from 2016-2019 Mandiant only rated two vulnerabilities as critical, while NVD assigned 3,651 vulnerabilities a ‘critical’ rating.
