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Vulnerability Haruspicy: Picking Out Risk Signals from Scoring System Entrails

We’ll be at Summer Camp all week, keeping things spicy at Black Hat and beyond.

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Vice President, Security Research

Tod Beardsley

August 7 @ 2:30pm PDT

Vulnerability scoring is supposed to bring order to the chaos of risk management, but in practice, it can feel more like reading tarot cards or poking at entrails than applying science. CVSS performs monkey math to force fractal bell curves, EPSS tries to predict exploitation with statistical black magicks, and SSVC ditches math entirely in favor of structured gut feelings.

Meanwhile, defenders mix and match shortcuts — KEV lists, vendor advisories, and lived experience — to separate the truly urgent from the merely annoying. But are we actually making better risk decisions, or just using these frameworks to justify what we were going to do anyway?

This talk will dig into the strengths, weaknesses, and absurdities of CVSS, EPSS, and SSVC, comparing them to the reality of how security teams actually handle vulnerabilities. This talk will explore where these models help, where they mislead, and whether any of them are meaningfully better than rolling a D20 saving throw vs exploitation. Expect debate, disagreements, and plenty of astrology jokes.

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More Great Things From Tod

Reports
Divining Risk: Deciphering Signals From Vulnerability Scores
Vulnerability scores promise clarity, but too often just add to the noise. In this report, we analyze signals from over 270,000 CVEs to reveal what...
Read the Report
runZero Research
CVSS, EPSS, and SSVC: How to Read Between the Vulnerability Scores
Learn about strengths and limitations of each scoring systems – and how to best leverage them inform your triage strategy.
Read More
Podcasts
From Vulnerability to Visibility: Rethinking Exposure Management
Learn how exposure management is evolving and how organizations can move from simply identifying vulnerabilities to gaining true visibility and...
Watch Now
Webcasts
Unknown Assets: A Lurking Threat to Network Security
In this EcoCast, presented by Tod Beardsley VP of Security Research, discusses proactive strategies for defending against zero-day exploits and...
Watch Now

More Summer Camp Talks!

BSides • August 4 @ 11am PDT
Turbo Tactical Exploitation: 22 Tips for Tricky Targets
Join HD Moore as he delivers rapid-fire, practical tips to help you spot valuable targets faster, pivot smarter, and skip the noise. From recon to lateral movement (and everything in between), these techniques are built for speed and getting the most out of every packet, port, and pivot.

Whether you’re on a red team or just want to better understand your exposure, you’ll leave with new ways to spot weak links fast — and exploit them even faster.
Learn More
Diana Initiative • August 4 @ 3pm PDT
Forging Strong Cyber Communities in Uncertain Times
HD Moore and Nicole Schwartz explore what it takes to create and foster robust cybersecurity communities and why we should all get involved in these important initiatives — now more than ever. HD will share insights from developing the open-source Metasploit Project, drawing parallels with the enduring principles of in-person community building that Nicole and her fellow board members rely upon to grow and sustain The Diana Initiative.

Learn strategies for initiating and scaling these networks, discover ways to contribute regardless of skillset, and see why participation is crucial to building collective resilience against evolving cyber threats.
Learn More
BSides • August 5 @ 1pm PDT
What Should CVE Be When It Grows Up?
The CVE Program is a pillar of the cybersecurity ecosystem.

Over the past 18 months, the CVE Program and U.S. National Vulnerability Database have faced funding challenges, while the EU has launched its own vulnerability database. In June, Congress called for a formal audit of the program.

This panel at BSides, featuring runZero's own Tod Beardsley, will discuss the future of the CVE Program, how it should effectively communicate its value to policymakers, and how to preserve its role without fracturing the broader vulnerability disclosure ecosystem.
Learn More
Black Hat Arsenal • August 6 @ 11am PDT
Akheron Proxy - Interchip communication serial proxy
Matthew Kienow and Deral Heiland will be at Black Hat Arsenal Station 9 diving into Akheron Proxy, a serial communication proxy application tool designed to connect and proxy serial communication between microprocessors on a hardware circuit board.

See how to capture, decode, replay, and fuzz serial communications flowing between microprocessors on an embedded device circuit board in real time.
Learn More
DEF CON ICS Village • August 9 @ 3pm PDT
There and Back Again: Detecting OT Devices Across Protocol Gateways
Join Rob King, Director of Applied Research, for a discussion on legacy protocols that are still widely used in the OT world and how devices that speak them are often hidden behind protocol gateways.

Rob will also share creative methodologies for discovering devices on the other side of these gateways safely and effectively. Come jump down the OT rabbit hole with us!
Learn More
DEF CON Main Stage • August 9 @ 3pm PDT
Shaking Out Shells with SSHamble
Secure Shell (SSH) is finally fun again! After a wild two years, including a near-miss backdoor, clever cryptographic failures, unauthenticated remote code execution in OpenSSH, and piles of state machine bugs and authentication bypass issues, the security of SSH implementations has never been more relevant.

This session is an extension of our 2024 work (Unexpected Exposures in the Secure Shell) and includes new research as well as significant updates to our open source research and assessment tool, SSHamble.
Learn More

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