One of the biggest challenges for cyber security teams is to have a good vulnerability
management policy, since in real-life it is impossible to patch every vulnerability
once it is discovered. In this report we point you to the CVEs that were popular
among threat actors on the Dark and Deep Web during the past year.
In order to identify these CVEs, we examined 15 different Deep and Dark Web
forums in English, Russian, Turkish, Chinese and Spanish (more
than half were Russian-speaking forums). The research was focused on the CVE-
related posts that were published on these sources between January 01, 2020 and
March 01, 2021. Of note, to avoid numerous duplicates, replies to posts were not
collected and analyzed.
While working on the findings’ analysis, we realized that the popularity of a CVE
isn’t necessarily based on the number of posts published about it. Since a post
can receive many replies and raise interest or not receive any replies at all, the
distribution of each CVE in these forums should also be taken in consideration. A
wide distribution of CVE-related posts among multiple forums in different languages
can also be an indication for the CVE’s popularity.
Introduction
2 Vulnerability Threat Intelligence Report