The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a paper Wednesday that lays out its plan for improving the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, a contract for which nearly ended last year before a last-minute reprieve.

The white paper outlines the components of a “Quality Era” for the program, widely used as the definitive clearinghouse for data on vulnerabilities in software and other products, even as the number of CVEs surges. 

“CISA remains committed to leading, growing and sustaining the CVE Program into the foreseeable future, just as we’ve done for more than 25 years without fail,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity. “Informed by CVE community feedback, this whitepaper communicates CISA’s effort to support and enable stronger participation and governance, a program-wide maturation effort.”

The CVE program has been in a “Growth Era,” according to CISA. Over 67,000 new CVEs have been published in 2026 as of last week, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology National Vulnerability Database program has seen a 263% increase in CVE submissions between 2020 and 2025. Artificial intelligence has furthered the rise.

“These pressures intensify quality challenges across the CVE ecosystem,” the white paper states. “While faster discovery and reporting can improve the value of vulnerability information when records are complete, consistent, timely, and actionable, the same acceleration can expose gaps in processes, tooling, coordination, and accountability — especially when the quality of the submissions is uneven.” 

The plan calls for advancing data quality across four key dimensions: transparent and effective program governance, broad and active participation across the global software community, data infrastructure that supports CVE operational functions and reliable CVE record content.

Some vulnerability experts have questioned whether other organizations should take over CISA’s stewardship, given budget cuts at the agency.

Butera invited further feedback from the CVE community on the white paper, which stems from an earlier strategy document on the future of the program.

Some CVE experts that CyberScoop spoke to were supportive of what CISA wants to achieve, but skeptical about elements of the white paper.

“We’ve been working around long-standing quality issues in CVE reports for decades. Incomplete or inconsistent records create real downstream work for the security tools, developers, and organizations trying to determine whether they’re actually affected and what to do next,” said Sonatype’s co-founder and chief technology officer Brian Fox. “So it’s good to see CISA acknowledge that quality has to extend beyond the record itself to governance, infrastructure, and participation across the ecosystem.”

But, he added, “I’ll believe we’ve entered a ‘Quality Era’ when we can see the improvement in the actual data and in the decisions that data enables.”

Tom Alrich, who leads the OWASP PURL Expansion Working Group that’s focused on establishing a protocol for creating Product URLs for commercial software, said CISA’s white paper ignores a particularly important and growing issue.

“I support everything mentioned. I also support the flag, motherhood and apple pie,” he said. “However, nothing in there is going to affect the CVE program’s most important problem: that a huge and growing percentage of new CVE records don’t contain a machine-readable software identifier.”

Caitlin Condon, VulnCheck’s vice president of security research, said that “CISA and the CVE program are well-positioned to both observe challenges in this space and to create (and enforce) standards that explicitly state what ‘quality’ means in CVE records.”

But she said the white paper was more the basis for a future framework than a full-fledged framework in itself.

“Many of the potential success metrics suggested in the document can be measured today, but simply aren’t shared publicly,” Condon said. “In future iterations on the framework, I’d hope to see more transparency on CVE metrics as they stand today, along with reasoning on why those metrics are the right ones (versus simply the things that are easiest to measure qualitatively or quantitatively).”

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NATO’s cyber defense arm and a startup that uses artificial intelligence to find software flaws can now issue the ID numbers the industry uses to track those flaws, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity announced last week. 

The NATO Cyber Security Centre, part of the NATO Communications and Information Agency, and AISLE, a cybersecurity company with offices in San Francisco and Prague, joined as CVE numbering authorities under the ENISA Root. The CVE program assigns a unique record to each publicly disclosed security flaw so that governments, vendors and researchers have a common marker when referring to particular vulnerabilities. 

Twenty numbering authorities now sit under the ENISA Root, with 12 brought in by ENISA itself and eight moving over from the MITRE Root, run by the U.S. nonprofit that has handled the program’s daily work for more than 20 years.

Hans de Vries, ENISA’s chief cybersecurity and operations officer, linked the growth to changes in how people find flaws. 

“Recent developments in the global cybersecurity landscape, coupled with the emergence of Frontier AI models and their impact on vulnerability discovery and exploitation, have underscored the need to build strong vulnerability management infrastructure and capabilities,” he said in a statement. He said ENISA’s role helps build a “more globally representative, resilient, and scalable vulnerability identification ecosystem.”

The two new members show how bespoke each member is within its authority. The NATO Cyber Security Centre can now assign CVE IDs to eligible flaws across the NATO enterprise. The agency said that will make tracking more consistent and let the alliance share information with trusted partners sooner. The center guards NATO’s networks, watches for threats and coordinates the response when incidents hit.

Meanwhile, AISLE’s authorization is narrower. The company said in a July press release that the designation covers vulnerabilities discovered in its own products, allowing it to publish identifiers without waiting for a third-party authority to process a request. 

Jaya Baloo, the company’s co-founder, described the step as “foundational” and said coordinated disclosure “starts with holding your own products to the same standard you expect of everyone else.” Separately from the designation, the company said its researchers have disclosed hundreds of vulnerabilities in widely used open-source software, including OpenSSL, Linux, Apache and OpenEMR, each coordinated through the relevant authority for that project.

The changes come as the CVE process continues to involve amid program upheaval and the torrent of vulnerabilities discovered by AI systems. 

The CVE program, run by CISA, narrowly escaped a sudden demise when a last-minute, 11-month contract extension averted a shutdown in April 2025. Since then, several competing databases from European nonprofits and other private entities have been stood up in order to better coordinate how vulnerabilities are tracked, disclosed, and ultimately patched.

Earlier this year, The Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg (CIRCL) launched the Global CVE Allocation System, or GCVE, as an alternative to the CVE program.

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Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday security program reached an unrivaled pinnacle this month, as the vendor addressed 622 vulnerabilities across its suite of business products and systems. 

“The bug apocalypse has finally descended upon us,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

“The mother of all releases. To call this record-breaking is an understatement,” he added. “The CVE count year-to-date exceeds all other years’ totals.”

The startling increase in vulnerabilities reflects a compounding effect taking root across software as artificial intelligence plays a growing role in discovering and developing patches for defects lurking in error-riddled applications. 

Microsoft’s June Patch Tuesday update broke the previous all-time record with 206 vulnerabilities.

The company last week warned forewarned customers and defenders that a flood of defects would be uncovered as it applies its multi-model agentic scanning harness (MDASH) to discover and address vulnerabilities at greater speed and scale.

The monthly exponential rise in Microsoft vulnerabilities already puts the vendor on pace to break a full-year record, ending 2026 with the largest annual collection of defects, beating the previous record of 1,245 CVEs in 2020, Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in an email. 

“It’s probable that we will not only exceed 2,000 CVEs in a calendar year, but potentially over 3,000 CVEs this year or more,” he added.

“The volume is striking, but it reflects how good these tools have become at finding bugs, not how many of those bugs actually pose a risk to organizations,” Narang said.

Microsoft disclosed two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-56155 and CVE-2026-56164, privilege escalation defects in Active Directory Federation Services and Microsoft SharePoint Server, respectively. 

The monthly batch of patches included 416 defects in Windows, 82 in Office and 46 in Microsoft Edge. More than 1 in 10 vulnerabilities the vendor disclosed — 63 total — were rated as critical.

“The products covered this month are also astonishing,” Childs said. “Just about everything you’ve ever heard of is getting patched.”

The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.

SAP also addressed a fresh assortment of vulnerabilities Tuesday, including critical defects CVE-2026-44747 in SAP NetWeaver Application Server and CVE-2026-27690 in SAP Approuter.

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