Strauss Center Cybersecurity Clinic Lead  Francesca Lockhart was recently featured in the Texas Standard discussing the potential defunding of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, a vital resource for tracking software security threats. Lockhart emphasized the risks that cutting federal support for the program would pose to global cybersecurity coordination, particularly as organizations rely on the CVE database to prioritize and patch vulnerabilities.

The CVE program “is the backbone of the cybersecurity industry because it provides researchers and cyber defenders – as well as the tools that they use to secure their networks and systems – a single source of truth for identifying and managing weakness in software, and those weaknesses are often exploited by adversaries” states Lockhart. Without the program, “…we would potentially see some additional weaknesses in our devices and software for a longer period of time, which could lead to outages and exploit by attackers.”