FIRST has unveiled the latest version of its Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS 4.0). CVSS is important for the connection between suppliers and consumers. It helps identify the main characteristics of security vulnerabilities and gives them a score that shows how serious they are. This helps businesses; service providers, government, and the public understand and deal with the vulnerabilities better.
CVSS 4.0
The scores can be classified as low, medium, high, or critical to help organizations evaluate their vulnerability management processes and defend against cyber-attacks. This system lets consumers assess real-time threat and impact, giving them important information to defend against an attack.
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Common Vulnerability Scoring System
CVSS 4.0 is a widely used standard for vulnerability assessment. It aims to provide accurate vulnerability assessment for organizations and the public. The program improves metrics for consumers, removes scoring ambiguity, simplifies threat metrics, and enhances the assessment of security requirements and controls.
Moreover, various additional characteristics have been incorporated into vulnerability assessment, such as Automatable, Recovery, Value Density, Vulnerability Response Effort, and Provider Urgency. There is also additional applicability to OT/ICS/IoT, with Safety metrics and values added to both the Supplemental and Environmental metric groups.
The road to CVSS 4.0
The sector will transform with the new CVSS 4.0, which will improve its ability to handle threats. Prior to 2005, custom, incompatible rating systems were used to define severity before a need for standardized vulnerability measurements across software and platforms was identified.
CVSS version 1 was released in February 2005 with the goal of being adopted by the industry. FIRST was appointed in April to drive future development of CVSS.
Over a dozen FIRST members of the CVSS Special Interest Group (SIG) collaborated extensively. Throne CVSS version 1 was revised and improved in 2006 and 2007. This was done by testing and re-testing hundreds of real-world vulnerabilities. The result was the release of version 2 in June 2007.
In 2015, a third version of the tool was developed. It introduced the concept of ‘Scope’ to manage the scoring of vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may be present in one software component but affect a different software, hardware, or networking component.
A new version, 3.1, was released in June 2019. This version clarified and improved upon version 3.0. It did not add new metrics or values but focused on improving the clarity of concepts and making the standard easier to use. One new addition was the CVSS Extensions Framework.
This release is an important advancement. It has added capabilities that are crucial for teams. These capabilities help with threat intelligence and environmental metrics for accurate scoring.
Another function of note is the nomenclature. CVSS is not just the Base Score, so to further highlight this new nomenclature has been adopted in version 4.0:
CVSS-B: CVSS Base Score
CVSS-BT: CVSS Base + Threat Score
CVSS-BE: CVSS Base + Environmental Score
CVSS Base + Threat + Environmental Score
Testing CVSS 4.0
Many of the 900 industry leaders, from across the globe, are now testing CVSS version 4.0 in real-time before public launch. Cyber security issues are increasing worldwide. Global coordination is crucial to make the internet safe for everyone. Programs like CVSS 4.0 are important for both the sector and the public.
The CEO of FIRST, Chris Gibson, said that the CVSS system has been developing quickly for the past 18 years. Each new version improves our ability to protect against cyber criminals.
I am immensely proud of the CVSS-SIG for the hard work and dedication it has taken to produce version 4.0. And it is timely as we continue to see a significant rise in threats across the world.”