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National Vulnerability Database (NVD) Shifts to Selective Enrichment as CVE Volume Surges

In this post, we examine what NVD’s shift to selective enrichment means for vulnerability workflows and how security teams can maintain visibility and prioritization at scale.

The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is changing how it processes and enriches vulnerability data in response to sustained growth in CVE submissions.

Under a new model announced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NVD will no longer enrich every CVE. Instead, enrichment efforts will focus on a defined subset, including vulnerabilities in the CISA KEV catalog, software used by the federal government, and software designated as critical.

All other CVEs will remain in the database without additional context unless specifically requested.

Rising disclosure volumes are placing pressure on public vulnerability infrastructure, and it has direct implications for how security teams consume and act on vulnerability data.

What Changed in NVD’s Operating Model

For years, NVD aimed to provide consistent enrichment across all CVEs, including severity scoring, affected product data, and supporting context for prioritization.

That approach has not been sustainable since late 2023.

In 2025, Flashpoint tracked 44,509 disclosed vulnerabilities, 14,593 of which had publicly available exploits (and 1,944 more with proof-of-concepts). 

CVE submissions increased by 263% between 2020 and 2025, with 2026 already tracking higher year-over-year. Even with increased throughput, NVD has not been able to keep pace.

Under the updated model:

• CVEs meeting prioritization criteria will be enriched on an accelerated timeline
• CVEs outside those criteria will be labeled and left without enrichment
• Re-analysis of modified CVEs will occur selectively
• Separate NVD severity scoring will no longer be applied by default

This introduces a significant structural change in how vulnerability data is published and maintained.

The Impact on Vulnerability Workflows

Many security programs rely on NVD enrichment to operationalize CVE data. That enrichment provides the context needed to evaluate risk and determine remediation priorities.

With enrichment applied selectively, teams will encounter a growing number of CVEs that include:

• Limited or no severity scoring
• Incomplete product and version data
• Minimal context on exploitability or impact
• No CPE strings that allow for programmatic consumption of data

At the same time, disclosure volume continues to rise, and exploitation timelines remain compressed. This creates a gap between what is disclosed and what can be acted on efficiently.

Security teams will need to account for:

• Larger backlogs of CVEs without actionable context
• Increased manual effort to evaluate relevance and risk
• Greater variability in data quality across sources

These changes affect vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and security operations workflows simultaneously.

Prioritization Criteria Will Not Capture the Full Risk Landscape

NVD’s updated model focuses enrichment on a defined set of criteria, including known exploited vulnerabilities and software relevant to federal systems.

These categories represent important segments of risk, but they do not encompass the full set of vulnerabilities that organizations encounter in practice.

Modern environments include:

• Open-source dependencies
• SaaS platforms and APIs
• Cloud infrastructure and services
• Third-party and partner integrations

Many vulnerabilities affecting these environments fall outside formal prioritization frameworks or lack immediate classification within public datasets. As a result, security teams will continue to face exposure from vulnerabilities that are:

• Actively exploited but not yet included in prioritized lists
• Missing complete metadata or enrichment
• Relevant to their environment but not captured by federal-centric criteria

Vulnerability Intelligence Requires Broader Coverage and Deeper Context

As public enrichment becomes more selective, organizations will rely more heavily on alternative sources to maintain visibility and context.

Effective vulnerability intelligence requires:

• Coverage across CVE and non-CVE vulnerabilities
• Continuous tracking of exploitation activity and adversary usage
• Context on exploit maturity, and remediation
• Consistent enrichment that can be integrated into operational workflows

This level of detail supports faster and more accurate decision-making in environments where both volume and speed are increasing.

Flashpoint’s vulnerability intelligence model is built to address these requirements, with a dataset that includes over 7,000 known exploited vulnerabilities and ongoing analyst-driven enrichment across global sources.

What Security Teams Should Do Next

This shift in NVD operations does not change the need to track CVEs. It changes how that data can be used. Security teams should evaluate how their current workflows depend on:

• NVD enrichment for prioritization
• CVSS scoring as a primary decision input
• Completeness of public vulnerability data

From there, teams can take steps to strengthen resilience:

• Incorporate sources of vulnerability intelligence that cover CVE and more
• Align prioritization to exploitation activity and environmental relevance
• Validate coverage across software, cloud, and third-party dependencies
• Ensure that enrichment gaps do not delay remediation decisions

A Structural Shift in Vulnerability Data

For many teams, NVD has been a default source of vulnerability context. This change makes clear that its role is narrowing at a time when disclosure volume and prioritization demands are increasing.

At the same time, the role of vulnerability intelligence is expanding.

Security teams need access to data that supports prioritization, not just identification. They need consistent enrichment, faster turnaround, broader coverage, and context tied to real-world activity. As disclosure volumes continue to grow, those requirements become more central to how organizations manage risk.

Flashpoint’s Vulnerability Intelligence provides this level of coverage and context, with analyst-driven enrichment, global visibility across CVE and non-CVE vulnerabilities, and a dataset that includes over 7,000 known exploited vulnerabilities.

Request a demo to see how Flashpoint helps security teams prioritize and act on vulnerability risk with greater precision and confidence.

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Flashpoint’s Top 5 Predictions for the 2026 Threat Landscape

Flashpoint’s forward-looking threat insights for security and executive teams, provides the strategic foresight needed to prepare for the convergence of AI, identity, and physical security threats in 2026.

As the global threat landscape accelerates its transformation, 2026 marks an inflection point requiring defensive strategies to fundamentally shift. The volatility observed in 2025 has paved the way for an era soon to be defined by AI-weaponized autonomy, information-stealing malware, systemic instability of public vulnerability systems, and the complete convergence of digital and physical risk.

Flashpoint offers a unique window into these complexities, providing organizations with the foresight needed to navigate what lies ahead. Drawing from Flashpoint’s leading intelligence and primary source collections, we highlight five key trends shaping the 2026 threat landscape. These insights aim to help organizations not only understand what’s next but also build the resilience needed to withstand and adapt to emerging challenges.

Prediction 1: Agentic AI Threats Will Weaponize Autonomy, Forcing a New Defensive Standard

2026 will see continued evolution of AI threats, with future attacks centering on autonomy and integration. Across the deep and dark web, Flashpoint is observing threat actors move past experimentation and into operational use of illegal AI. 

As attackers train custom fraud-tuned LLMs (Large Language Models) and multilingual phishing tools directly on illicit data, these AI models will become more capable. The criminal intent shaping their misuse will also become more sophisticated. Additionally, 2026 will see a greater marketplace for paid jailbreaking communities and synthetic media kits for KYC (Know Your Customer) bypass.

These advancements are enabling criminals to move beyond simple tools and engage in scaled, autonomous fraud operations, leading to two major shifts:

1. Agentic AI is becoming the true flashpoint: Threat actors will be using agentic systems to automate reconnaissance, generate synthetic identities, and iterate on fraud playbooks in near real-time. In this SaaS ecosystem, AI will help attackers leverage subscription tiers and customer feedback loops at scale.
2. The attack surface will shift to focus on AI Integrations: Organizations are increasingly plugging LLMs into live data streams, internal tools, identity systems, and autonomous agents. This practice often lacks the same security vetting, access controls, and monitoring applied to other enterprise systems. As such, attackers will heavily target these integrations, such as APIs, plugins, and system connections, rather than the models themselves.

“The ubiquity of automation has dramatically increased attack tempo, leaving many security teams behind the curve. While automation can replace repetitive tasks across the enterprise, organizations must not make the critical mistake of substituting human judgement for AI at the intelligence level.

This is paramount because a critical threat in 2026 is Agentic AI autonomy weaponized against soft targets—API integrations and identity systems. The only winning defense will be human-led and AI-scaled, prioritizing purposeful use to keep organizations ahead of this exponential risk.”

Josh Lefkowitz, CEO at Flashpoint

These evolving AI threats will force a fundamental shift in defensive strategies. Defenders will have to shift to deploying systems around AI rather than trust them on their own.

Prediction 2: Identity Compromise via Infostealers Will Become the Foundation of Every Attack

Infostealers will become the entry point, the data broker, the reconnaissance layer, and the fuel for everything that comes after a cyberattack. This shift is already in motion and is accelerating rapidly: in just the first half of 2025, infostealers were responsible for 1.8 billion stolen credentials, an 800% spike from the start of the year. However, 2026 will redefine the malware’s role, making its most valuable output being access, rather than disruption.

Infostealers will become the upstream event that powers the rest of the attack chain. Identity and session data will be increasingly targeted, since it gives attackers immediate access into victim environments. Ransomware, fraud, data theft, and extortion will simply be downstream ways to monetize.

This upstream approach defines the new reality of the attack chain, which is already operational. Nearly every major stealer strain Flashpoint observes now exfiltrates the following:

• Autofill PII (personable identifiable information)
• Saved addresses
• Phone numbers
• Internal URLs
• Browsing history
• Cloud app tokens

An organization’s attack surface is no longer just composed of their own networks. It is the entire digital identity of their employees and partners. This new reality requires security teams to take a new approach. Instead of attempting to block attacks, they must proactively detect compromised credentials before they are weaponized. This will be the difference between reacting to a data breach and preventing one.

“The infostealer economy has fully industrialized the attack chain, making initial compromise a low-cost commodity. Multiple security incidents in 2025 tie back to credentials found in infostealer logs. This reality has underscored the critical importance of digital trust—specifically, verifying who can access what resources. For 2026, identity is the perimeter to watch, and security teams must proactively hunt for compromised credentials before they’re weaponized.”

Ian Gray, Vice President of Intelligence at Flashpoint

Prediction 3: CVE Volatility Will Force Redundancy in Vulnerability Intelligence

The temporary funding crisis at CVE in April 2025 and the subsequent CISA stopgap extension through March 2026 exposed the systemic fragility of a centralized vulnerability intelligence model. With the future of the CVE/NVD system hanging in the balance, 2026 will be defined by the urgent need for redundancy and diversification in vulnerability intelligence.

In today’s vulnerability intelligence ecosystem, nearly every organization’s vulnerability management framework relies on CVE and NVD—including its “alternatives” such as the EUVD (European Union Vulnerability Database). The CVE system has grown into a critical global cybersecurity utility, relied upon by nearly all vulnerability scanners, SIEM platforms, patch management tools, threat intelligence feeds, and compliance reports. A complete shutdown of CVE would result in a widespread loss of institutional infrastructure.

The next generation of security needs to be built on practices that are resilient, diversified, and intelligence-driven. It should be focused on providing insights that can be used to take action such as threat actor behavior, likelihood of exploitation in the wild, relevance to ransomware campaigns, and business context. Security teams will need to leverage a comprehensive source of vulnerability intelligence such as Flashpoint’s VulnDB that provides full coverage for CVE, while also cataloging more than 100,000 vulnerabilities missed by CVE and NVD.

Prediction 4: Executive Protection Will Remain a Critical Challenge as Cyber-Physical Threats Converge

The continued blurring of lines between cyber, physical, and geopolitical threats will elevate the risk to organizational leadership, turning executive protection into a holistic intelligence function in 2026. The rise of information warfare combined with physical world convergence means the threat to key personnel is no longer purely digital.

In the aftermath of the tragic December 2024 assassination of United Healthcare’s CEO, Flashpoint has seen the continued circulation and glorification of “wanted-style posters” of executives in extremist communities. Additionally, Flashpoint has seen nation-state actors participate, using espionage and influence to target high-value individuals.
Organizations must adopt an integrated approach that connects insights from threat actor chatter and a wealth of other OSINT sources. This fusion of intelligence is essential for applying frameworks to ensure the safety of leadership and key personnel.

Prediction 5: Extortion Shifts to Identity-Based Supply Chain Risk

2025 was marked by several large-scale extortion campaigns, demonstrating how the threat landscape is rapidly evolving. Ransomware operations have shifted into a straight extortion play. Flashpoint has observed a surge in new entrants to the ransomware market, accompanied by a decline in the quality and decorum of ransomware groups.

Furthermore, vishing campaigns attributed to “Scattered Spider” have highlighted weaknesses in identity, trust, and verification. Campaigns from “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” have also exposed vulnerabilities in third-party integrations. These attacks culminated in extortion, showcasing that modern attacks will target trusted users and trusted applications for initial access, and will forgo ransomware in place of data access.

As this shift continues into 2026, threat actors will increasingly focus their efforts on exploiting human behavior and identity systems. Instead of attempting to spend resources on breaking network perimeters, attackers will instead socially engineer employees to gain access to corporate systems at scale. This change in TTPs will undoubtedly greatly increase supply chain risk, especially for third parties.

Charting a Path Through an Evolving Threat Landscape with Flashpoint Intelligence

These five predictions highlight the transformative trends shaping the future of cybersecurity and threat intelligence. Staying ahead of these challenges demands more than just reactive measures—it requires actionable intelligence, strategic foresight, and cross-sector collaboration. By embracing these principles and investing in proactive security strategies, organizations can not only mitigate risks but also seize opportunities to enhance their resilience.

As the threat landscape continues to rapidly evolve, staying informed and prepared are critical components of risk mitigation. With the right tools, insights, and partnerships, security teams can navigate the complexities ahead and safeguard what matters most.

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