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How a Contract Expiration Nearly Collapsed the Global Vulnerability Management Ecosystem
It was a typical Tuesday at security operations centers around the world. Analysts were monitoring their SIEM dashboards, vulnerability scanners were churning through their daily scans, and incident responders were triaging the usual flood of alerts – all of them relying on a system of identifiers most never think twice about.
Then MITRE dropped a bombshell.
On April 15, 2025, MITRE’s VP and Director of the Center for Securing the Homeland sent a letter to CVE Board members that read like the opening scene of a cybersecurity disaster movie. The letter stated that on Wednesday, April 16 – the very next day – “the current contracting pathway for MITRE to develop, operate, and modernize CVE and several other related programs, such as CWE, will expire.”
For those of us in the cybersecurity trenches, this wasn’t just another funding issue or program update. This was the digital equivalent of being told the foundation of your house would disappear overnight.
The Silent Architecture of Our Security Infrastructure
To understand the magnitude of what nearly happened, you need to appreciate the invisible architecture that makes modern cybersecurity possible. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers are the universal language of our industry – the system that, for 25 years, has allowed defenders worldwide to speak about the same security issues with precision and clarity.
Every vulnerability scanner you use? It maps findings to CVEs.
Every patch management system? Organized by CVEs.
Every threat intelligence feed? Structured around CVEs.
Every vendor security advisory? Categorized by CVEs.
In essence, CVE is the Rosetta Stone of cybersecurity – the translation layer that makes communication about vulnerabilities possible across different tools, teams, organizations, and nations.
If this system were to suddenly vanish, as was threatened on April 15, we would lose our ability to collectively understand and communicate about security risks. Imagine walking into work and discovering that, overnight, your entire security toolchain had lost its common reference framework. The day after would look very different. Tracking new vulnerabilities would mean tracking -every- -single- -project’s- own vulnerability list, which is simultaneously a Sysiphean task and absolutely impossible, since most projects don’t even track vulnerabilities themselves in any usable format. There would be no centralized source of truth.
24 Hours on the Precipice
The timeline of what unfolded next is a stark reminder of how fragile our security infrastructure can be:
April 15, 2025, morning: MITRE sends its letter to CVE Board members, warning of contract expiration the following day.
April 15, 2025, afternoon: Word begins to spread through the cybersecurity community as board members digest the implications.
April 16, 2025, morning: A group of longtime active CVE Board members announce the formation of the CVE Foundation – a desperate attempt to create a backup plan for the program’s survival.
April 16, 2025, late evening: CISA announces they’ve executed an extension of the contract with MITRE “to ensure there will be no lapse in critical CVE services.”
In less than 24 hours, we witnessed both the potential collapse and emergency rescue of a system fundamental to global cybersecurity. It was a close call – far closer than most security professionals realize.
What Nearly Broke
If CISA hadn’t extended the contract at the eleventh hour, the consequences would have been immediate and severe:
- Vulnerability management would fracture: Without new CVEs being issued, there would be no standard way to identify and track newly discovered vulnerabilities.
- Security tools would lose effectiveness: Vulnerability scanners, SIEMs, and other security tools rely on CVE mappings to correlate findings and prioritize issues.
- Patch management would become chaotic: Without CVEs as reference points, tracking which vulnerabilities have been patched across an enterprise would become exponentially more difficult.
- Incident response would be hampered: Teams would lose the common reference framework used to communicate about security issues during incidents.
- Threat intelligence would fragment: The ability to share accurate information about active threats across organizations would deteriorate.
All of this would occur while threat actors – particularly groups like Black Basta (recently exposed through leaked messages discussing their exploitation of over 60 CVEs just last year) – would continue operating with their existing playbooks, facing defenders suddenly stripped of their shared vulnerability language.
Not a Solution, but a Stay of Execution
While the immediate crisis was averted, what we received was not a solution but a reprieve. CISA’s contract extension lasts only 11 months – essentially a “stay of execution” rather than a pardon.
This temporary measure means the fundamental questions about the CVE Program’s long-term sustainability remain unresolved. We now have a defined countdown clock – 11 months to either secure permanent funding or successfully transition to an alternative governance model.
The Imperfect System We Cannot Afford to Lose
The CVE system is far from perfect. Critics have valid points about its limitations:
- It sometimes incentivizes reporting issues that barely qualify as security problems, forcing maintainers to waste time addressing them.
- The CVSS scoring system often seems more responsive to corporate interests than to objective risk analysis.
- We’ve experienced a flood of new CVEs in recent years, particularly after the Linux Kernel became a CNA and began flagging high volumes of bugs as CVEs.
- The fundamental design reflects the security landscape of 25 years ago, not today’s complex environment.
But, for all its flaws, CVE remains the only universal system we have. There is no viable alternative ready to deploy. No backup system waiting in the wings. No realistic way to independently track vulnerabilities across millions of different projects without a single source of truth.
And if you don’t believe how critical it is, take a less impactful system currently in use: a simple naming convention for different threat actors. Because we don’t have a standard equivalent to the CVE system for naming threat actors, we have ridiculous vendor-specific naming schemes, like colors and weather phenomenon on one vendor, something completely different for another, yet another vendor uses numbers – in the end, you need a guide and a dictionary just to understand if a given activity refers to the same threat actor when facing different situations. It makes effective information gathering needlessly more difficult and slower, especially in situations where clear intent and speed of response are essential. If it happened for CVEs, the impact would be orders of magnitude more relevant.
The Hidden Fragility of Critical Infrastructure
This near-miss reveals something troubling about the cybersecurity ecosystem: many of our most critical resources rest on surprisingly fragile foundations.
For 25 years, most security professionals never questioned whether the CVE system would continue to exist. It was infrastructure so fundamental that its potential disappearance wasn’t considered a realistic scenario – until it almost happened.
This raises uncomfortable questions: What other critical cybersecurity infrastructure might be similarly vulnerable to sudden disruption? What other “too important to fail” systems might be one contract expiration away from collapse?
Moving Forward: The Race Against an 11-Month Clock
The formation of the CVE Foundation represents one potential path forward – a nonprofit entity focused solely on continuing the mission of delivering high-quality vulnerability identification and maintaining the integrity and availability of CVE data worldwide.
But with only 11 months until we potentially face this same crisis again, we cannot afford to simply wait and hope. This narrow window demands immediate, coordinated action on multiple fronts:
- Establish a sustainable governance model that represents global interests, not just those of a single nation. This model must be resilient to political shifts and funding uncertainties.
- Develop practical replacement mechanisms for how vulnerabilities are identified, cataloged, and disseminated globally – mechanisms that can operate without dependence on a single point of failure.
- Adapt our entire toolchain to fetch vulnerability information from multiple, alternative sources. Every scanner, SIEM, threat intelligence platform, and security tool in existence may need updates to accommodate a new approach.
This is a monumental undertaking that would be challenging even with years to implement – attempting it in just 11 months seems nearly impossible. Yet, as this incident clearly demonstrates, maintaining the status quo is not a viable alternative.
The harsh reality is that no system this critical should remain under the control of a single entity – be it a government agency, corporation, or non-profit. The current governance model has been proven fundamentally insecure, regardless of which party holds the keys.
A Wake-Up Call: CVE Is Just the Beginning
The 24 hours during which we nearly lost the foundation of modern vulnerability management should serve as a wake-up call. But we would be dangerously mistaken to think CVE is an isolated case.
The CVE system was merely the victim “du jour.” Other critical internet infrastructure systems suffer from identical governance vulnerabilities. Consider the DNS root servers – another system upon which the entire digital world depends, yet one that could theoretically face similar existential threats under the right (or wrong) circumstances. The same could be said for certificate authorities, time servers, routing infrastructure, and other fundamental systems we rarely think about until they’re at risk.
As security professionals, we diligently identify single points of failure in the systems we protect daily. Yet somehow, we’ve allowed the very infrastructure that enables our profession to develop severe dependencies and governance vulnerabilities.
The 11-month countdown is ticking – not just for CVE, but as a warning that we must rethink the fragile foundations of our digital ecosystem. We must use this reprieve to build more resilient governance models for all critical cybersecurity infrastructure, distributing control and eliminating single points of failure before we find ourselves facing yet another existential crisis – possibly with far less warning next time.
The choice is clear: transform how we govern and manage these foundational systems now, or continue to lurch from crisis to crisis, forever just one contract termination away from digital chaos.
