Core Certified Exploits

The universe of vulnerabilities is huge and not all of them represent the same risk for the customers. Vulnerabilities do not all have the same level of criticality. Some may be easily exploitable by a low-level user, while others may not be exploitable at all. To increase the efficiency of the attacks and the quality of the exploits provided, the Core Impact team has developed selection criteria to prioritize its analysis and implementation. We determine which exploits warrant creation based on the following questions:

• What are the most critical attacks from the attacker’s perspective?
• What new vulnerabilities are more likely to be exploited in real attacks?
• What exploits are the most valuable for Core Impact?

Once an exploit is approved, its priority order considers the following variables: 

• Vulnerability Properties: CVE, disclosure date, access mechanism and privileges needed. 
• Target Environment Setup: OS, application prevalence, version and special configurations needed. 
• Value Provided to Core Impact: Customer request, usage in multiple attacks, allows the installation of an agent, etc. 
• Technical Cost vs. Benefit: An analysis weighing the resources needed to build an exploit with the internal and external knowledge gained in its creation. 

Each one of these variables has a different weight and provides a ranking of the potential exploits to be developed. Following those criteria, the top of the list would contain, for example, a vulnerability on Windows (most popular OS) that can be exploited remotely, without authentication and that provides super user privileges. 

Correspondingly, a vulnerability on an application that is rarely installed, needs special configurations, and requires User Interaction, would be at the bottom.