The CVE Funding Crisis Is A Wake-Up Call For Cyber Resilience

Uploaded on 2025-05-14 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW

The news that MITRE’s CVE Program funding was potentially at risk, points to not just a strong focus on vulnerability management but a renewed drive on cyber resilience. Frankly, it couldn’t come at a more pivotal time for the cybersecurity community.

For over two decades, the CVE system has been the connective tissue between security teams, technology vendors, and defenders everywhere. It’s how we collectively name, track, and prioritise vulnerabilities.

In a world of fragmented data, the CVE program was one unified attempt at driving clarity and alignment across data silos. If that coordination breaks down, the consequences ripple across every industry.

The incident made one thing crystal clear: visibility and context must be the foundation of every security program - especially when trusted systems face uncertainty. Avoiding single points of failure and driving the right data as the source of truth for security, IT, and compliance professionals can only be achieved through a critical focus on data aggregation, correlation, and enrichment.

The CVE System Isn’t Just About IDs - It’s About Alignment

Most people think of CVEs as a list of vulnerability identifiers. But in practice, the CVE system provides a lingua franca - a shared language that allows vulnerability scanners, patching systems, SIEMs, and CMDBs to speak to each other. It helps security teams act fast and with confidence. When that foundation is shaken, the rest of the process becomes more fragmented and reactive.

Even if the CVE ecosystem becomes less predictable, enterprises must ensure that asset visibility, vulnerability context, and response workflows won’t grind to a halt.

Visibility Turns Uncertainty Into Action

One of the core problems with a potential CVE disruption is that it increases uncertainty. Without a central, trusted registry, how do you know what matters? How do you separate a one-off bug from a widespread threat?

For much of the security industry, the CVE system has long served as a key reference point for identifying vulnerabilities. However, in today’s complex IT environments, relying on a single source is rarely sufficient. Organisations can benefit from aggregating data across multiple systems - including vulnerability scanners, CMDBs, EDR, IT asset management, threat intelligence feeds, and more - to gain a comprehensive, contextual view of their exposure and risk landscape.

This multi-source approach ensures that when one dataset is incomplete or unavailable, visibility and response capabilities remain intact. The ability to trust in your data - regardless of where it originates - enables faster, more confident decisions, whether to remediate an issue or take proactive protective measures.

As discussions continue around the future of CVEs, whether managed by MITRE or evolving under a new model, the fundamental questions for security teams remain the same:

What assets do we have?

Where are they located?

Are they exposed?

And critically — does it matter to our business?

A Changing Landscape Demands Resilience

While businesses have no control over the funding or future of CVE, what they can control is how to adapt. A key method for ensuring adaptability is to utilise a platform which integrates emerging sources of vulnerability intelligence and enriches asset data with broader context, to give teams the flexibility to handle disruption without slowing down.

If the CVE system is weakened or fragmented, it proves that the best defence isn’t just knowing which vulnerabilities exist - it’s knowing how they apply to your environment, and being able to act accordingly. It also underscores a core principle - never becoming fully dependent on a single database or system of record.

In cybersecurity, resilience means building with optionality, and combining data from multiple systems to build a system of truth - so when one source falters, your ability to see, prioritise, and act doesn’t.

Actionability isn’t about where your data comes from, it’s about what you can do with it.

Ryan Knisley is Chief Product Strategist at Axonius

Image: Ideogram

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