Measuring the Exploitation of Weaknesses in the Wild

Published

June 26, 2024

Author(s)

Peter Mell, Irena Bojanova, Carlos Eduardo Cardoso Galhardo

Abstract

Identifying the software weaknesses exploited by attacks supports efforts to reduce developer introduction of vulnerabilities and to guide security code review efforts. A weakness is a bug or fault type that can be exploited through an operation that results in a security-relevant error. Ideally, the security community would measure the prevalence of the software weaknesses used in actual exploitation. This work advances that goal by introducing a simple metric that utilizes public data feeds to determine the probability of a weakness being exploited in the wild for any 30-day window. The metric is evaluated on a set of 130 weaknesses that were commonly found in vulnerabilities between April 2021 and March 2024. Our analysis reveals that 92 % of the weaknesses are not being constantly exploited.

Citation

IT Professional (IEEE)

Volume

26

Issue

3

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2024.3399485

Local Download

Keywords

attack, exploit, machine learning, weakness, vulnerability, security

Citation

Mell, P. , Bojanova, I. and Cardoso Galhardo, C. (2024), Measuring the Exploitation of Weaknesses in the Wild, IT Professional (IEEE), [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2024.3399485, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957805 (Accessed October 10, 2025)