You know the feeling. Your Slack pings at 2 AM. A critical alert. A new CVE has been filed against a core piece of open-source infrastructure. You drop everything, scramble your team, and waste hours investigating—only to find out it’s a complete non-issue. You’ve felt the frustration, but have you ever wondered who actually benefits from this noise?
The system designed to make software safer is actively rewarding people for manufacturing alerts, not eliminating threats.
Look no further than what just happened to Daniel Stenberg, the maintainer of curl (software that effectively runs the internet). A researcher submitted a vulnerability. Daniel reviewed it. It wasn’t a real threat. He rejected the CVE request. Case closed, right?
Wrong. MITRE—the bureaucratic governing body that issues CVEs—started badgering him. Why did you reject it? Give us a reason. He gave them a reason. They came back again. Are you sure? Give us another reason. They used the Microsoft model of consent: nag the user until they finally give up and click ‘yes’.
When a bureaucratic giant starts badgering a maintainer to accept a non-existent flaw, the vulnerability isn’t in the code—it’s in the ecosystem.
Why the immense pressure? Because CVEs aren’t a security catalog anymore. They are a status economy. As one industry commenter noted, ‘you aren’t a real hacker until you have a CVE to your name.’ Researchers need CVEs on their resumes to get raises, land jobs, and build clout in the community. Someone must have really wanted to put this on their CV.
The exploit chain here is brilliantly cynical: manufacture noise, capture credentialing status, and externalize the massive operational cost onto maintainers and security teams worldwide.
We have turned a security database into a LinkedIn endorsement system, and we are paying for it with our alert fatigue.
Every fake CVE triggers a global panic. Security teams burn thousands of hours patching ghosts. Maintainers burn out answering badgering emails from institutions that are supposed to be helping them. And while we’re all busy chasing noise, the genuine threats slip right through the cracks.
The real vulnerability being exploited isn’t in curl. It’s the CVE ecosystem itself. The next time your dashboard lights up red, ask yourself: is this a genuine threat to my infrastructure, or is someone just adding a line to their resume? Stop trusting the system. Start questioning the incentives.
FAQ
Q: Isn't more vulnerability reporting better for security?
A: No. Reporting non-issues creates alert fatigue. When everything is flagged as a critical vulnerability, nothing is. It drowns out the actual threats and wastes finite security team resources.
Q: What's the practical implication of this CVE status economy?
A: Security teams are wasting thousands of hours patching ghosts, while open-source maintainers burn out answering badgering emails from institutions. We are all paying a hidden tax on software reliability.
Q: What's the contrarian take on how to fix this?
A: The CVE system needs a drastic overhaul. We should penalize researchers who submit fake or non-existent vulnerabilities, stripping them of the credentialing status they desperately chase.