By Byron V. Acohido
Just hours before it was set to expire on April 16, the federal contract funding MITRE’s stewardship of the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) program was given a temporary extension by CISA. Related: Brian Krebs’ take on MITRE funding expiring
This averted an immediate shutdown, but it didn’t solve the underlying problem. Far from it. The system that underpins vulnerability disclosure—the nervous system of cybersecurity risk management—is showing signs of structural fatigue. And we’re long overdue for a serious discussion about what continuity and resilience should actually look like in this space.
Several longtime colleagues of mine have voiced sharp, necessary observations in the wake of this narrowly avoided shutdown.
One of the clearest signals this crisis sent is how fragile our vulnerability disclosure pipeline really is. The CVE program isn’t just a list of numbers—it’s a Rosetta Stone that security teams rely on to identify, prioritize, and communicate risk. Brian Krebs got straight to the heart of it: without continued funding, the site might stay online, but no new CVEs would be added. That would paralyze threat response efforts across both public and private sectors at a time when precision and speed are everything.
Whither the outcry?
What’s more troubling is how little urgency the broader industry showed as the situation unfolded. We all say CVEs are essential—but where was the outcry? Deb Radcliff, a longtime peer whose clarity I’ve come to respect deeply, raised this uncomfortable point on her LinkedIn feed. The community, she observed, largely failed to rally. That’s a telling indictment of how cybersecurity still struggles to treat its shared infrastructure as something worth fighting for.
And if this near-shutdown rattled operations, it also exposed an underlying architectural flaw. The entire system is too centralized, too brittle. Francesco Cipollone, CEO of Phoenix Security, unpacked this well in his recent blog post. He pointed out how modern DevSecOps pipelines depend on timely, machine-readable CVE data—and when that data stutters, threat modeling, SBOM tracking, and risk scoring all start to fail. Cipollone’s response? Build a more resilient, federated model. One that synchronizes across multiple data sources and continues delivering actionable insight, even when a single node falters.
New architecture needed?
Cipollone isn’t just observing the problem—he’s actively rethinking the architecture. Phoenix Security is building a federated vulnerability knowledge base, cross-validating against sources like VulnCheck, OSV.dev, and GitHub. That may be a model worth watching—and emulating.
Together, these voices draw a sharp outline. Krebs warned us the foundation is cracking. Radcliff called out the industry’s failure to respond. Cipollone offered a path forward—one that’s decentralized, resilient, and built to last.
And that’s where the real opportunity lies. The emergency patch from CISA buys us time, but not resolution. If anything, this close call should jolt us into rethinking how we fund, govern, and evolve the infrastructure we all rely on. From federated data sources to vendor-backed redundancy, now’s the time to experiment boldly—and build something stronger than what nearly broke.
Let’s not wait for another near-collapse to take this seriously.
Acohido
Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.
(Editor’s note: A machine assisted in creating this content. I used ChatGPT-4o to accelerate research, to scale correlations, to distill complex observations and to tighten structure, grammar, and syntax. The analysis and conclusions are entirely my own—drawn from lived experience and editorial judgment honed over decades of investigative reporting.)
By Byron Acohido (Pulitzer Prize-Winning Business Journalist)
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