Re:What science can tell us about C and C++'s security (2020)
by pclmulqdq on Monday August 02, 2021 @05:52PM
(#28043165)
Unfortunately, CVEs come up when security researchers find something interesting to publish, whereas actual breaches usually come from a hacker exploiting some sysadmin's poor configuration.
Unfortunately, often these are not called "vulnerabilities", or rather when people talk about "vulnerabilities" they are referring to bugs like these which are not often the main attack vectors used in real data breaches.
This is a semantic terminology thing and not really useful to most people, and is part of the reason why the conclusion is a little overblown, because even though it might cut down on the number of CVEs, the reality is that it probably won't have much impact on the amount of data breaches and ransomware attacks. It's much more commonly started by phishing and with less frequency well-known vulnerabilities of all classes - memory corruption being only a fraction of that fraction. It's just not super relevant to security anymore, at least in comparison to what is costing people billions of dollars a year.