There's only so much code: the rise in vulnerability numbers

The September Microsoft Tuesday release included 975 vulnerability advisories. This month,1,415 vulnerabilitieswere just dropped. Compared to a pre-June average of 100 a month, that increase is staggering. Where did they come from?

As of April, frontier models came onto the scene more fine-tuned than ever toward vulnerability detection, particularly with the introduction of Mythos. The deluge brings a lot of questions:

The answer to many of these questions boils down to this: The majority of these vulnerabilities are coming from repositories of old code from large-profile products and systems; and disclosure does not equal weaponization.

AI is chewing through a backlog of technical debt in libraries and tools used as the dependable, best-practice lynchpins of so many environments. These models have a new perspective, an ability to "think" without some of the hangups or assumptions of human defenders, and they are thorough in listing those vulnerabilities.

Entrenched older tools have always been prime targets because of their predictability; attackers know those tools and all their secrets, and they know what is likely to be present in a network with them. Multi-exploit attacks can be deployed with little variability.

Pre-Mythos threat actors exploited log4j (CVE-2021-44228) to immense success. The library was ubiquitous, included in nearly every environment, but not a component that got cataloged in visibility scans. A combination of scale and low visibility meant defenders were blindsided, scrambling to find out if they even used the log4j library before starting to concoct a mitigation plan.

Talos has ongoing relationships with some of the largest technical vendors (such as the Microsoft Active Protections Process (MAPP) agreement). Organizations share additional information—detection guidance or maybe a POC — for vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited, to enable Talos to provide adequate coverage when the advisories are announced.  "Microsoft believes it is important for us to provide detection content, based on their guidance," as Yves Younan, Director of Talos Vulnerability Discovery, Detection, and Testing, says.

Talos has needed to invest more resources to get coverage in on time for critical vendors like Microsoft to keep up with notifications coming in fast and often on staggered or out-of-band timelines.

For larger vendors, the pressure is handleable for now. However, open-source projects are getting flooded. Some projects have a trusted group that can combine to tackle patches, and some share with the full community for immediate assistance, but it is up to the project. The internet runs on open-source work.

The pace of discovery presents a challenge for the traditional coordinated disclosure system vulnerability hunters have been using for years, and some are calling it into question.

Security vulnerabilities should be reported, to enable an informed defender base and regular patching, and vendors responsible for vulnerable code need time to create coverage. A timed disclosure model where notifications are sent to a vendor, who then has a set period of time (typically 90 days) to provide coverage before the disclosure is released publicly, has created a more secure online environment for decades.

Now, many practitioners are releasing advisories publicly without a disclosure period beforehand. The reasoning is that if one AI can find a weakness, any other could, so the vulnerability is already, effectively, released.

This conversation is actively changing expectations around vulnerability disclosure, and guidance is in flux.

No one knows the future, but we can always look to the past for insight.

Numbers of vulnerabilities jump drastically when a new bug class is identified, as their possibilities are explored to the fullest. Then the discoveries plateau and drop off.

When format string vulnerabilities were discovered as a new bug class in 2000, the initial influx of discoveries ramped up and up, until reaching a peak in 2005 and then slowly declining over the next couple of years. Format string vulnerabilities are still discovered, but they are a smaller overall fraction of the number of CVEs discovered in a year.

Theoretically, AI-assisted vulnerability discovery could go the same way.

While frontier models have not discovered a new vulnerability class, they are more efficient at discovering known types of software vulnerabilities. Given that a lot of vital software has a long history of code releases, there’s plenty of code to mine for weaknesses. But there’s onlyso muchcode… right?

Old and commonly used tools are often under the highest scrutiny, lending them one kind of safety: Because of their popularity, utility, and stability, when popular tools have vulnerabilities, they are discovered fast and patched promptly.

As the historical backlog of essential systems is turned over by AI, vulnerabilities will be found and patched. New code will ideally be run through AI bug-checkers that will prevent new vulnerabilities from being introduced. The rate of new vulns should level off and drop accordingly.

There are some caveats. In the past, as vulnerability disclosures increased through coordinated disclosures, we saw increased adoption of mitigations. Exploitation became significantly harder. Attackers often need to chain together 3 or more vulnerabilities to successfully exploit a system.

However, more awareness of vulnerabilities often leads to more exploitation. Attackers often use vendor patches meant to protect customers to discover where vulnerabilities might exist. The frequency of patching has delayed human attackers via parsing bottlenecks, but AI can eliminate that problem.

The volume is certainly up.

Fresh as this blog is being finished, the October Patch Tuesday dropped almost 500 more than last month.

With refinement, any vulnerability could become a link to a path of effect. But... not all vulnerabilities are exploitable. Some arewildlyimpractical for attacker use. In fact, the percent of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs) is vastly smaller than the found vulnerabilities.

Of the 975 vulnerabilities Microsoft reported in September, there were only three in-the-wild exploits detected. When viewed by percentage, vulnerabilities versus KEVs tell a different and perhaps reassuring story.

Compared with the same period last year, additions to the known-exploited vulnerability list increased by 37%, while published CVEs increased by 105%. However, we wouldn't necessarily expect those figures to grow in proportion. Adversaries only need enough useful vulnerabilities to compromise their targets, and the same vulnerabilities can be reused against many organizations. The KEV count tracks distinct vulnerabilities known to be exploited, not the number of attacks or successful compromises.

AI helps ingest code, advisory reports, and attack surfaces with inhuman speed, but it cannot currently make judgment calls about the value of a weakness.

For defenders, the question remains the same: Which vulnerabilities provide a viable path into their environment, and how do you close those paths?

The undeniable danger here is in exploitation time going down rapidly, while the vulnerabilities that could become exploits is still going up. The biggest hurdle for a defender is determining what is a real vulnerability for their environment, and what is not.

Different defenders have different forms of control depending on their role.

For those who are writing code, the new standard validation chain should include AI evaluation by models at least as up to date as those being used to hunt for vulnerabilities. It is relatively cheap to run new code through AI, but very expensive to run a cumbersome backlog of old code through. Bite it off in chunks.

For those whose role involves keeping the tools ready: Upgrade ASAP.  Don't stop there.

Dive deeper into this conversation with the latest TTP interview with Yves Younan and vulnerability researcher Bella Fusari.

For more numbers and advice for defenders:

The cybersecurity community has seen examples of autonomous agents, built inside AI labs, attacking public infrastructure. How you prepare for agentic threats is what makes the difference during real incidents.

What really frustrates an adversary? Eight Cisco Talos researchers share practical ways to make their next move slower and riskier, from deception and behavioral detection to breaking attack dependencies and resisting manufactured urgency.

Advances in AI technology will continue to identify vulnerabilities that in some circumstances are difficult, or effectively impossible, to patch. Appropriate network segmentation, rigorous visibility, and the deployment of NGFW/IPS combinations can provide a powerful compensatory layer.