Number of Vulnerabilities Grows in 1Q18 but So Does Pace of Disclosure

The first quarter of 2018 was not a great start to the year in terms of the total number of reported security vulnerabilities. Risk Based Security released its first-quarter 2018 Vulnerability QuickView Report on May 15, detailing the state of vulnerabilities thus far in 2018. For the first quarter, Risk Based Security’s VulnDB team reported 5,375 vulnerabilities, which is a 1.8 percent year-over-year increase. Looking at the disclosed vulnerabilities, 67 percent were due to insufficient or improper input validation. On a positive note, 74.3 percent of the vulnerabilities reported in the first quarter have a documented solution. In this slide show, eWEEK looks at some of the highlights of the Vulnerability QuickView report for the first quarter of 2018.

The first quarter of 2018 marked a record high for reported vulnerabilities—5,375—according to Risk Based Security.

Nearly half (47.2 percent) of vulnerabilities reported in the first quarter were coordinated with the impacted vendor.

Looking at the impact of the reported vulnerabilities, 56 percent affected the integrity of the products, thanks to SQL injection, cross-site scripting and data manipulation issues.

Nearly half (49 percent) of reported vulnerabilities in 1Q18 had a remote attack vector.

According to the report, 40.8 percent of vulnerabilities published in the first quarter had either public exploits available or sufficient details publicly disclosed to enable the vulnerability to be exploited.

Input validation was the leading attack type in the vulnerabilities disclosed in the first three months of 2018. Input validation includes shell command injection, buffer overflows, cross-site scripting and SQL injection.

The majority of vulnerabilities published in 1Q18 have either patches or software upgrades available.