CISA Directs Federal Agencies to Prioritize Security Patches Based on Risk

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday announced a new directive that requires federal agencies to prioritize patching the highest-risk security flaws. CISA established the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog in 2021, accompanied by BOD 22-01, which directed agencies to aggressively patch bugs in the catalog within specific timeframes. It also required them to report the status of KEV vulnerabilities, without penalizing those that did not meet the deadlines. According to CISA, the new ‘Binding Operational Directive 26-04: Prioritizing Security Updates Based on Risk’ builds on BOD 22-01 and the KEV catalog to advance priorities in securing federal networks and outline critical steps to more aggressively fortify them. “The requirements in this Directive align with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130: Managing Information as a Strategic Resource, which establishes policy for the management of federal information resources,” CISA notes. BOD 26-04 requires federal agencies to review and update their vulnerability management policies, provide CISA with copies of these policies upon request, and prioritize the remediation of security weaknesses included in the KEV catalog. Federal agencies are also required to monitor KEV catalog updates, address the new issues in line with the provided timelines, ensure ongoing vulnerability remediation and automate reporting of the status of KEV vulnerabilities, and inventory and tag externally-accessible assets. To support the effort, CISA commits to updating the KEV catalog as soon as new exploited flaws are identified and to providing federal agencies with the necessary metadata and guidance. “Within 60 days, CISA will publish data requirements, outlining how agencies should supply machine-level asset tagging information using a standardized data schema,” CISA says. The agency also provided remediation timelines for security vulnerabilities, which have been developed based on the technical impact of each bug, or “how much post-exploitation control an adversary gains over the affected asset.” Thus, security defects in publicly exposed assets that have been added to the KEV catalog and can be automated by attackers should be addressed within three days. Even if automation is not possible, the same urgency applies to flaws that lead to total control over the vulnerable asset. Federal agencies should prioritize any security issue impacting publicly exposed assets that could lead to total control if automation is possible, even if the vulnerability has not been added to the KEV list, as well as any KEV flaw in any other asset, if it can be automated and can lead to total control. The remediation timeframe increases to 14 days or 60 days for security weaknesses considered to pose a lower risk: they are not on the KEV list, cannot be automated, and/or do not affect publicly exposed assets. “The BOD is narrowly focused on CVE prioritization, and in that focus, it misses the connection between downstream privilege debt and the acceleration of pre-positioning, persistence, and lateral movement. That matters because you can’t patch everything—but you can retire privilege debt in an environment to limit the blast radius and disrupt threat actors’ capabilities,” BeyondTrust chief cybersecurity technologist Kevin E. Greene commented.  “I wholeheartedly agree that moving away from CVSS as the prioritization driver is the right call. But understanding downstream privilege debt is equally important to making a CVE operationally ineffective. A CVE that cannot reach the privilege plane is operationally ineffective—even at a CVSS score of 10. The SSVC model in the BOD tells you how bad one CVE’s blast is on its component, but what it misses is whether that component sits on a path to a privilege plane, and where the chokepoint is to collapse that path,” Greene added.   Related: Hackers Exploit Langflow Vulnerability for Remote Code Execution Related: Claude Mythos Turns N-Days Into N-Hours With Rapid Exploit Creation Related: NIST Prioritizes NVD Enrichment for CVEs in CISA KEV, Critical Software Related: SAP Patches Critical NetWeaver, Commerce Vulnerabilities WRITTEN BY Ionut Arghire Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek. 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