Breaking: Disclosure Theater: Why Our Vulnerability Management Is Built On A...

Posted on Jan 9

• Originally published at harwoodlabs.xyz

The security industry just discovered something uncomfortable: while we debated 90-day disclosure windows, attackers were sitting on VMware exploits for over a year. This isn't an outlier. It's a feature of modern vulnerability management, and it reveals how fundamentally broken our entire approach has become.

We've built an elaborate theater around vulnerability disclosure that assumes we're racing against time to patch before attackers discover flaws. But what happens when this premise is completely false? What happens when sophisticated attackers already have working exploits while we're still arguing about responsible disclosure timelines?

The answer is that we continue the charade anyway, because admitting the truth would require rebuilding everything.

Recent analysis suggests that exploits for critical VMware zero-day vulnerabilities were likely developed and in active use roughly a year before their public disclosure. While security teams scrambled to apply patches within their carefully planned maintenance windows, state-sponsored actors were already deep inside networks, moving laterally and establishing persistence.

This isn't a story about a sophisticated attack campaign. It's a story about the gap between security theory and reality. The entire responsible disclosure ecosystem assumes that public revelation of a vulnerability starts the exploitation clock. In reality, that clock started ticking when someone competent first looked at the code.

The VMware case illuminates a harsh truth: the vulnerability management process as practiced today is optimized for an adversary model that stopped being relevant years ago. We're fighting yesterday's script kiddies with yesterday's assumptions about discovery timelines.

The security community has spent decades refining responsible disclosure practices. We've established 90-day windows, negotiated coordination protocols, and built elaborate systems for tracking CVE assignments. These processes make intuitive sense if you believe vulnerability discovery follows a predictable pattern where security researchers find flaws first and attackers catch up later.

This belief is demonstrably false for any vulnerability that matters.

Advanced persistent threat groups don't wait for CVE publications to build their toolkits. They invest in reverse engineering, source code analysis, and systematic weakness discovery. By the time

Source: Dev.to