NIST narrows scope of CVE analysis to keep up with rising tide of vulnerabilities

Source Domain: cyberscoop.com

The federal agency tasked with analyzing security vulnerabilities is overwhelmed as it and other authorities struggle to keep pace with a flood of defects that grows every year. The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced Wednesday that it has capitulated to that deluge and narrowed the priorities for its National Vulnerability Database.

NIST said it will only prioritize analysis for CVEs that appear in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog, software used in the federal government and critical software defined under Executive Order 14028.

The federal agency’s goal with the change is to achieve long-term sustainability and stabilize the NVD program, which has encountered previous challenges, notably a funding lapse in early 2024 that forced NIST to temporarily stop providing key metadata for many vulnerabilities in the database.

The agency still hasn’t cleared a backlog of unenriched CVEs that built up during that pause and grew since then.

NIST said it analyzed nearly 42,000 vulnerabilities last year, adding that CVE submissions surged 263% from 2020 to 2025. “We don’t expect this trend to let up anytime soon. Submissions during the first three months of 2026 are nearly one-third higher than the same period last year,” the agency said in a blog post announcing the change.

Indeed, vulnerabilities are increasing across the board. For instance, Microsoft addressed 165 vulnerabilities Tuesday, its second-largest monthly batch of defects on record.

NIST said CVEs that don’t fit its more narrow criteria will still be listed in the NVD, but they won’t be automatically enriched with additional details.

“This will allow us to focus on CVEs with the greatest potential for widespread impact,” the agency said. “While CVEs that do not meet these criteria may have a significant impact on affected systems, they generally do not present the same…

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