Related Twitter threads here:
https://twitter.com/carnal0wnage/status/367734642213801985
https://twitter.com/SelsRoger/status/367751020442832897

One thing you should pay attention to, as someone who works in IT security is 
how the various assumptions change over time. It used to be that managing your 
network security was how well you used a few simple product types. Essentially 
we had network sniffers and network scanners of various sorts, along with the 
signature-based AVs. Most enterprises remember having tons of network sniffer 
monkeys looking at logs and sniffer alerts and then trying to use that to 
generate some level of activity. But that turns out to be mindbogglingly 
expensive, and ineffective as we have all learned the hard way.

This then changed into how well you integrate and analyze information from 
these tools. The SIEM was born. The downside being that sorting through massive 
amounts of noise to find tiny signals is by definition expensive, no matter how 
good your tool is.

This is also true on the assessment side - small errors can add up to cloud 
your situational awareness. For example, in the below referenced Twitter stream 
you can see a penetration tester scanning a network using a vulnerability 
assessment tool, which then marks a potential ColdFusion bug as "medium". Part 
of this is because the National Vulnerability Database marked it as having a 
CVSS score of 7.5, despite it being a remote, unauthenticated, SYSTEM-level 
vulnerability. 

That said, if all you had was the Vulnerability Assessment data, you would 
probably relegate fixing this weakness to "when I get around to it", which 
would explain all the nicely vulnerable ColdFusion boxes on the Interwebs. 

So my conclusion here is that despite all thoughts to the contrary, CVSS, the 
NVD, and hence vulnerability risk rankings, do, in fact matter.  

-dave

As a post-script, Nessus has updated their score on this particular 
vulnerability. I emailed the NVD about it too.



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