EPSS

As an avid daily reader of TLDR Information Security I benefit twofold. First, I gain interesting insights and recommendations regarding launches and tools, where I first learned about OctoSQL. Second, concerning vulnerability details inevitably land in my inbox on a near daily basis. Aside from my recommendation to join the TLDR InfoSec mailing list, toolsmith readers also benefit twofold as, herein, I share the use of OctoSQL as a fast CLI interface to vulnerability data aggregated via CVE-Vulnerability-Information-Downloader. If ever you’ve wanted to join vulnerability data (CVE, CVSS, EPSS, etc) from disparate data sources and file types, this is the toolsmith for you.

If you follow Cyentia Institute’s Jay Jacobs via social media you may FIRST ;-) have learned about the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) from him, as I did. I quickly learned that FIRST offers an API for the EPSS Model, which immediately piqued my interest. Per FIRST, EPSS provides a fundamentally new capability for efficient, data-driven vulnerability management. While EPSS predicts the probability (threat) of a specific vulnerability being exploited, it can scale to estimate the threat for multiple vulnerabilities on a server, a subnet, mobile device, or at an enterprise level (Jacobs, 2022).
“The (EPSS) is a community-driven effort to combine descriptive information about vulnerabilities (CVEs) with evidence of actual exploitation in-the-wild. By collecting and analyzing these data, EPSS seeks to improve vulnerability prioritization by estimating the likelihood that a vulnerability will be exploited. The EPSS model produces a probability score between 0 and 1 (0% and 100%). The higher the score, the greater the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited (in the next 30 days)” (Jacobs, 2022).
As of February 2022, EPSS version 2 is available; give Jay’s write-up a good read before proceeding. EPSS v2 is preceded by EPSS v1 and CVSS v3. Note the significant increase in model coverage and efficiency per Figure 1.