CVSS rated these two Palo Alto CVEs as manageable. Chained together, they gave attackers root access to 13,000 devices.
During Operation Lunar Peek in November 2024, attackers gained unauthorized administrator access — and eventually root — to more than 13,000 exposed Palo Alto Networks administrative areas. Palo Alto Networks found CVE-2024-0012 in 9.3 and CVE-2024-9474 in 6.9 under CVSS v4.0. NVD scored the same 9.8 and 7.2 under CVSS v3.1. Two scoring systems. Two different responses to the same injury. 6.9 dropped below the patch threshold. Administrator access was deemed necessary. 9.3 is sitting in the queue for a fix. Isolation will hold.
"Enemies jump over you [severity ratings] by combining weaknesses together," Adam Meyers, SVP of Counter Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview on April 22, 2026. For the triage genius who missed the series: "They just had amnesia from 30 seconds before."
Both CVEs reside in the CISA Known Vulnerabilities catalog. There are no points to mark the kill chain. The triage logic that consumed those points treated each CVE as an individual event, as did the SLA dashboards and the board reports those feed dashboards.
CVSS does exactly what it was designed to do. Find one vulnerability at a time. The problem is that enemies don’t attack one vulnerability at a time.
"CVSS baseline scores are theoretical measures of severity that ignore real-world context," writes Peter Chronis, former Paramount CISO and Fortune 100 experienced security leader. Going beyond CVSS-first deployment at Paramount, Chronis reported reducing replaceable and high-risk vulnerabilities by 90%. Chris Gibson, executive director of FIRST, the organization that maintains the CVSS, was equally straightforward: using only the CVSS core score for prioritization "at least it’s fair and accurate" way, Gibson told the Register. FIRST’s EPSS and CISA’s SSVC decision model address part of this gap by adding exploitability and decision tree logic.
The five failure categories CVSS was not designed to capture
By 2025, 48,185 CVEs were disclosed, a 20.6% year-over-year increase. Jerry Gamblin, principal engineer at Cisco Threat Detection and Response, projects 70,135 in 2026. The infrastructure behind the score buckled under that weight. NIST announced on April 15 that CVE deployments have increased by 263% since 2020, and NVD will now prioritize KEV enrichment and critical software for the organization only.
1. CVE chains look safe until they aren’t
Palo Alto from Operation Lunar Peek is a textbook. CVE-2024-0012 Skipped validation. CVE-2024-9474 privilege escalation. Scored separately under both CVSS v4.0 and v3.1, the escalation bug was filtered under multiple enterprise patch restrictions because administrator access was deemed necessary. The incremental authentication bypass completely removed that requirement. There are no points linked to the combined effect.
Meyers described the psychology of the operation: teams evaluate each CVE independently, remove the lowest score, and put the highest in line for correction.
2. Enemies of the country’s empire arming the episodes within days
The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report documented a 42% year-over-year increase in threats used as zero days before public disclosure. Average downtime for all interventions seen: 29 minutes. Fastest observed explosion: 27 seconds. Adversaries of the China-nexus weaponized newly disclosed vulnerabilities within two to six days of disclosure.
"Before it was Patch Tuesday once a month. Now it’s a patch every day, every time. What is this new world like?" said Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike. The addition of KEV which is considered a normal line item on Tuesday becomes an active exploitation window on Thursday.
3. CVEs have been collected by international players that they have been holding for years
Salt Storm reached the communications of US political officials during the presidential transition by including CVE-2023-20198 and CVE-2023-20273 in Cisco Internet-facing devices, a privilege escalation that was paired in October 2023 and still has not been implemented more than a year later. Degraded authentication provided the corresponding input vector. The episodes were there. It was never used again.
Sixty-seven percent of the vulnerabilities exploited by China-nexus adversaries in 2025 were remote code execution errors that provide immediate system access, according to the CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report. CVSS does not lower priority based on how long a CVE has gone unpublished. There are no onboard metrics that track exposure to KEV aging.
That silence is vulnerability.
4. Proprietary spaces that never enter the scoring system
The 2023 call for social engineering aid against big business produced losses of more than $100 million. No CVE assigned. No CVSS scores were available. No patch pipeline entries have been created. Vulnerability was a human process gap in identity verification, sitting outside the open space of the points system.
"A technician needs a zero day if all you have to do is call the help desk and say I forgot my password," Meyers said.
Agent AI systems now manage their own identity credentials, API tokens, and permission scopes, working independently of traditional risk management. Merritt Baer, CSO at Enkrypt AI, argued on the record that proprietary controls are equivalent to a vulnerability with the same reporting pipeline as software CVEs. In many organizations, the help desk authentication gap and AI data inventory reside in a separate administrative area. Actually, there is no human rule.
5. Accelerated AI discovery that breaks pipelines
A preview by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos showed independent vulnerability detection, finding a full 27-year signed overflow in OpenBSD’s TCP SACK implementation across nearly 1,000 scaffolds at a total computer cost of less than $20,000. Meyers offered a thought-provoking idea in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat: if frontier AI increases the volume by 10x, the result is about 480,000 CVEs per year. Pipes are built for 48,000 break at 70,000 and collapse at 480,000. NVD enrichment is already gone for non-KEV shipments.
"If the adversary is now able to detect the vulnerability faster than the defenders or the business, that is a big problem, because that vulnerability becomes exploitation," said Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike on Thursday launched Project QuiltWorks, a remediation alliance with Accenture, EY, IBM Cybersecurity Services, Kroll, and OpenAI designed to address the volume of vulnerabilities that frontier AI models are now producing in production code. When five major firms form an alliance on a pipeline crisis, no single organization’s workflow can keep pace.
Security administrator app
The five categories of failure above map to five specific actions.
Conduct a chain dependency survey of all KEV CVEs in the area this month. Flag any CVE occupant who scores 5.0 or higher, the threshold at which privilege escalation and joint motion capabilities typically arise from CVSS vectors. Any bypasses of authentication by chains in privilege escalation are considered important regardless of individual points.
Push KEV-to-patch SLAs to 72 hours for online-facing systems. The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report breakout data, an average of 29 minutes and 27 seconds is the fastest, making the weekly patch windows vulnerable to the board presentation.
Prepare monthly KEV aging report for the board. All unpublished KEV CVE, dates since disclosure, dates since patch availability, and owner. Salt Storm exploited a Cisco CVE released 14 months earlier because there was no mitigation in place for the vulnerability.
Add identity-surface controls to the vulnerability reporting pipeline. Help desk authentication gaps and agent AI credentials are within the same SLA framework as software CVEs. If they sit in a different governing body, they sit in someone’s rule.
The stress test pipeline capacity is 1.5x and the current CVE volume is 10x. 70,135 Gamblin projects for 2026. Meyers’ thought projection: the AI frontier could push the annual volume past 480,000. Present the power gap to the CFO before the next budget cycle, not after a breach that proves the gap existed.
