The federal agency tasked with analyzing security vulnerabilities is overwhelmed as it and other authorities struggle to keep pace with a flood of defects that grows every year. The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced Wednesday that it has capitulated to that deluge and narrowed the priorities for its National Vulnerability Database.
NIST said it will only prioritize analysis for CVEs that appear in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog, software used in the federal government and critical software defined under Executive Order 14028.
The federal agency’s goal with the change is to achieve long-term sustainability and stabilize the NVD program, which has encountered previous challenges, notably a funding lapse in early 2024 that forced NIST to temporarily stop providing key metadata for many vulnerabilities in the database.
The agency still hasn’t cleared a backlog of unenriched CVEs that built up during that pause and grew since then.
NIST said it analyzed nearly 42,000 vulnerabilities last year, adding that CVE submissions surged 263% from 2020 to 2025. “We don’t expect this trend to let up anytime soon. Submissions during the first three months of 2026 are nearly one-third higher than the same period last year,” the agency said in a blog post announcing the change.
Indeed, vulnerabilities are increasing across the board. For instance, Microsoft addressed 165 vulnerabilities Tuesday, its second-largest monthly batch of defects on record.
NIST said CVEs that don’t fit its more narrow criteria will still be listed in the NVD, but they won’t be automatically enriched with additional details.
“This will allow us to focus on CVEs with the greatest potential for widespread impact,” the agency said. “While CVEs that do not meet these criteria may have a significant impact on affected systems, they generally do not present the same level of systemic risk as those in the prioritized categories.”
Researchers and threat hunters who analyze vulnerabilities for CVE Numbering Authorities (CNA) and vendors that publish their own assessments view NIST’s new approach as inevitable.
“They had to do something. NIST was woefully behind on classifying CVEs and would likely never have caught up,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, told CyberScoop.
“I’m not sure if it was a herculean task or a sisyphean one, but either way, they were set up for failure under their previous system. This change allows them to prioritize their work,” he added.
NIST’s new approach will impact the vulnerability research community at large, but also put more private companies and organizations in a position to gain more authority as defenders seek out more alternative sources.
Caitlin Condon, vice president of security research at VulnCheck, previously told CyberScoop that prioritization remains a problem, with too many defenders paying attention to vulnerabilities that aren’t worth their time.
Of the more than 40,000 newly published vulnerabilities that VulnCheck cataloged last year, only 1% of those defects, just 422, were exploited in the wild.
NIST is also trying to reduce other duplicitous efforts with its new approach, effectively leaning even more on CNAs. CVEs that are submitted with a severity rating will no longer receive a separate CVSS score from NIST, the agency said.
While the agency remains the ultimate authority providing a government-backed catalog of vulnerability assessments, it acknowledged these changes will affect its users.
“This risk-based approach is necessary to manage the current surge in CVE submissions while we work to align our efforts with the needs of the NVD community,” the agency said. “By evolving the NVD to meet today’s challenges, we can ensure that the database remains a reliable, sustainable and publicly available source of information about cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”
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