This week’s shakeup surrounding MITRE and the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program has been a wake-up call for everyone in the cybersecurity ecosystem. The Department of Homeland Security’s eleventh-hour decision to fund the CVE program just before its contract with MITRE was set to expire is not just a bureaucratic hiccup. It’s a near-miss that highlights how fragile some of our most foundational security systems really are.
If the database had gone dark, as it nearly did, we would have lost much more than a public index of vulnerabilities. We would have lost a shared language. A common framework. The ability to coordinate, prioritize and act in time.
When Vulnerability Naming Becomes the Wild West
Imagine an encryption flaw surfaces that impacts critical internet infrastructure. In the absence of the CVE system, one group might call it “The worst encryption flaw ever.” Another, “A terrible encryption flaw.” Without a standardized naming system—CVE-2024-XXXX, for instance—how would any of us know we’re talking about the same thing?
This isn’t hypothetical. It’s the chaos we narrowly avoided.
The CVE program isn’t perfect, but it is essential. It gives teams a baseline to coordinate responses across geographies, industries and technologies. Without it, security teams are left patching together information from GitHub posts, mailing lists, private disclosures and press releases often with overlapping or conflicting information. That’s not just inefficient; it’s dangerous.
The Cost of Losing CVE Is Measured in Minutes, Not Months
Every minute counts in cybersecurity. And when you consider that over 40,000 CVEs were published in 2024 alone, with many still being actively exploited years after initial disclosure, the loss of a unifying system like CVE would create ripple effects across the entire risk lifecycle—from discovery to disclosure to remediation.
Security professionals already shoulder an enormous burden. They’re grappling with expanding threat surfaces, limited resources and one of the highest burnout rates in the tech industry. Taking away a fundamental resource like CVE would only exacerbate those challenges.
This is exactly the kind of uncertainty DefectDojo is built to manage.
Our open-source platform doesn’t just track vulnerabilities. It helps teams correlate findings from multiple tools and databases, including CVEs, proprietary systems and emerging sources like the newly announced EU Vulnerability Database (EUVD). DefectDojo gives security teams the flexibility to adapt quickly while maintaining consistency in how vulnerabilities are triaged and remediated.
In moments like this, when the future of foundational infrastructure is unclear, having a centralized, customizable and automation-friendly tool like DefectDojo becomes even more critical. Our users don’t need to panic about which database is online or offline. They can pull from multiple sources, standardize how they log and respond to vulnerabilities and ensure that security work continues without disruption.
A Future with More Flexibility and More Responsibility
This week, the EU’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, launched their own vulnerability database: EUVD. It mirrors the CVE framework but adds a parallel classification system. While it’s promising to see alternative structures emerge, especially ones that acknowledge the global nature of cybersecurity, it also introduces a new layer of complexity.
Multiple vulnerability databases can offer resilience and regional relevance, but only if they remain interoperable. Fragmentation, without coordination, could be just as harmful as a single point of failure.
At DefectDojo, we’ve always believed in flexibility. Our platform is built to adapt to a variety of data sources, classification systems, and workflows. But we also believe in cohesion. Standards matter. Shared frameworks matter. And the temporary instability of the CVE program is a reminder that we can’t take any of it for granted.
Where We Go From Here
The cybersecurity community needs more than a funding extension—we need a long-term vision for maintaining and modernizing our shared infrastructure. Whether that means fortifying CVE through initiatives like the newly launched CVE Foundation, investing in alternatives like EUVD, or developing bridges between platforms, what’s clear is this: we can’t afford to wait until the next eleventh hour to take action.
Security teams need continuity and clarity. DefectDojo helps deliver both, especially when the systems we’ve long relied on are no longer a sure thing.
Let this moment serve as a prompt, not just a patch.