Analysing security vulnerability trends throughout the pandemic

The reason cyber security trends are important is that they can help organisations and individuals understand the types of threats that are most likely to occur and how to protect themselves from them. By being aware of current and future threats, people can make sure their systems are as secure as possible.

Cyphere, a Manchester-based cyber security services provider performed an analysis on the vulnerability trends throughout the pandemic. The pandemic has made it clear that the number of security vulnerabilities affecting major goods and services is growing accelerated, according to our study of NIST’s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) National Vulnerability Database data.

Just before you start, let’s break the jargon into a couple of terms you will come across when talking about cybersecurity.

CVE – CVE is the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures list, a comprehensive catalog of information security vulnerabilities and exposures. Every vulnerability or exposure on the CVE List has a unique CVE Identifier.

CWE – The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) is a classification system for software security vulnerabilities.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it!

Key findings from Cyphere’s NIST CVE analysis are:

• The total number of cyber security vulnerabilities peaked in 2021, at 20,157.
• 2020 saw the highest number of high-risk vulnerabilities with 4,379
• CWE-79 is revealed as the most prominent vulnerability since 2018
• Throughout the pandemic, there were 11,145 high-risk exposures and 1,602 vulnerabilities determined as a critical risk.

Detailed article on the vulnerability trends can be found here:

Security vulnerability trends analysis by Cyphere