The CVE Crisis: When the Backbone of Global Cybersecurity Nearly Broke

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The CVE Crisis: When the Backbone of Global Cybersecurity Nearly Broke

By: Gjylka Kavaja
Date: April 18, 2025

What Happens When the Internet’s Immune System Falters?

In the early weeks of April 2025, the cybersecurity world quietly edged toward a cliff. At the center of this tension was the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program — the digital world's immune system that enables everyone from security analysts to Fortune 500 companies to track and address software vulnerabilities.

If you've ever read a cybersecurity bulletin, applied a CVSS score, or patched a vulnerability labeled “CVE-2024-12123,” you've encountered this system in action.

Now imagine this system losing funding, collapsing under bureaucratic chaos — and potentially going dark.

That scenario almost played out this month.

What Is the CVE Program?

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Program, maintained by the MITRE Corporation and overseen by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was established in 1999. Its mission? Assign unique identifiers (CVE IDs) to known software vulnerabilities, creating a standardized way to track, share, and patch them.

Every vulnerability listed in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), every security bulletin issued by Apple, Microsoft, or Cisco — all of it relies on the CVE program. Think of it as the Dewey Decimal System of cybersecurity. Without it, defenders would be lost in a maze of disjointed, uncoordinated threat intelligence.

April 2025: A Crisis in the Making

On April 11, 2025, WIRED and The Verge reported that CISA was about to let its funding contract with MITRE lapse, putting the entire CVE system in limbo. Internally, MITRE employees were told to prepare for a complete stop in CVE assignments.

The reason? A contract renewal impasse. The U.S. government, despite its reliance on CVE data, hadn’t executed a timely renewal of MITRE's funding.

The implications of this moment were massive:

  • No new vulnerabilities would receive official CVE identifiers.

  • Software vendors would be forced to invent ad hoc systems for vulnerability disclosure.

  • Security teams would be left in the dark — unable to prioritize patches across thousands of systems.

Why This Matters: The Domino Effect

The CVE database isn't just an American tool — it’s a global utility.

  • Threat Intelligence Platforms (like Mandiant, Recorded Future, Rapid7) rely on CVE IDs to track real-world exploits.

  • Patch Management Systems sort updates and prioritize critical fixes using CVE identifiers.

  • SIEMs and SOAR tools (like Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel) correlate threat data using CVE entries.

  • Red teams and bug bounty platforms use CVEs as benchmarks for known attack surfaces.

  • Global regulation such as NIS2, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001:2022 refer explicitly to CVEs in compliance language.

Without CVEs, none of these mechanisms function smoothly. The result? A disjointed, fragile digital defense ecosystem.

The Technical Breakdown: Why CVEs Matter in Practice

Let’s get into the technical weeds for a second.

When a new vulnerability is discovered — say, a buffer overflow in OpenSSL — here’s what typically happens:

  1. Researcher Disclosure: A security researcher (or an organization like Google Project Zero) discloses the issue.

  2. CVE Assignment: The vulnerability is submitted to a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) — a vetted entity (e.g., Microsoft, Red Hat, or MITRE).

  3. Identifier Issued: A CVE ID like CVE-2025-12345 is assigned.

  4. CVSS Scoring: The vulnerability is analyzed using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to determine severity.

  5. Publication: The CVE record is published in the CVE list and then incorporated into the NVD.

  6. Patch and Response: Software vendors release patches referencing the CVE. Security scanners flag unpatched instances. SOC teams prioritize remediation.

This elegant pipeline keeps the cybersecurity world running. If the CVE step breaks, everything downstream slows or collapses.

The Fallout: Could This Happen Again?

The funding debacle raised serious questions:

  • Why is the CVE Program dependent on a single, annually renewed government contract?

  • Should the global cybersecurity community allow the U.S. government to maintain sole ownership of this critical infrastructure?

To address this, MITRE and members of the CVE Board are now considering the creation of an independent nonprofit, tentatively named the CVE Foundation. This model would mirror how other open, critical-infrastructure projects (like Let’s Encrypt or the Linux Foundation) operate.

Such a move would provide:

  • Neutral governance

  • Diverse funding sources

  • Greater resilience against government mismanagement or political interference

Global Trust in a Fractured Internet

It’s worth noting that several governments — notably in the EU and Asia-Pacific — are already exploring their own national vulnerability databases. The April CVE crisis could accelerate fragmentation in the global cybersecurity landscape.

That’s not ideal.

Cyber threats don’t respect borders. The CVE system — despite its flaws — is a rare example of global cooperation in digital defense. Letting it erode due to funding negligence would be a geopolitical own goal.

Final Thoughts: Don’t Let the Backbone Crumble

The near-collapse of the CVE Program in April 2025 isn’t just a bureaucratic blip — it’s a wake-up call. We rely on the CVE system the same way we rely on DNS or BGP: silently, constantly, and universally.

Whether you’re a SOC analyst triaging alerts or a CISO defending a multi-cloud environment, the CVE system is in your daily workflow. It’s time we treat it like the critical infrastructure it is.

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