MITRE specialists published a list of 25 most dangerous threats that can lead to vulnerabilities

Daniel ZimmermannSeptember 21, 2019

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Representatives of the MITRE organization prepared an updated list of 25 most dangerous problems and shortcomings in the software, which can lead to vulnerabilities and can be used by attackers for hacking systems.

This time, the top 25 was compiled on the basis of its own MITRE data, information from the NVD (National Vulnerability Database), as well as CVSS. Previously, the list was built on the basis of surveys and personal interviews with developers, leading security analysts, researchers and vendors.

“These weaknesses are often easy to find and exploit. They are dangerous because they will frequently allow adversaries to completely take over execution of software, steal data, or prevent the software from working”, — write MITRE specialists.

Problems from this list have their own CWE identifiers (not to be confused with CVE) – Common Weakness Enumeration. CWEs differ from CVEs, in fact, the former are the forerunners of the latter, so CWEs directly result in vulnerabilities.

CWEs are divided into more than 600 categories, and this year the list was supplemented by CWEs, which combine very extensive classes of various problems, for example, CWE-20 (incorrect input verification), CWE-200 (information disclosure) and CWE-287 ( incorrect authentication).

The top 10 problems identified by MITER specialists can be seen in the table below. Points were assigned to problems based on how often the CWE serves as a starting point for the actual vulnerability, as well as the severity of its potential exploitation.

Rank	ID	Name	Score
[1]	CWE-119	Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer	75,56
[2]	CWE-79	Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation (‘Cross-site Scripting’)	45,69
[3]	CWE-20	Improper Input Validation	43,61
[4]	CWE-200	Information Exposure	32,12
[5]	CWE-125	Out-of-bounds Read	26,53
[6]	CWE-89	Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an SQL Command (‘SQL Injection’)	24,54
[7]	CWE-416	Use After Free	17,94
[8]	CWE-190	Integer Overflow or Wraparound	17,35
[9]	CWE-352	Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)	15,54
[10]	CWE-22	Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory (‘Path Traversal’)	14,1
[11]	CWE-78	Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command (‘OS Command Injection’)	11,47
[12]	CWE-787	Out-of-bounds Write	11,08
[13]	CWE-287	Improper Authentication	10,78
[14]	CWE-476	NULL Pointer Dereference	9,74
[15]	CWE-732	Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource	6,33
[16]	CWE-434	Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type	5,5
[17]	CWE-611	Improper Restriction of XML External Entity Reference	5,48
[18]	CWE-94	Improper Control of Generation of Code (‘Code Injection’)	5,36
[19]	CWE-798	Use of Hard-coded Credentials	5,12
[20]	CWE-400	Uncontrolled Resource Consumption	5,04
[21]	CWE-772	Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime	5,04
[22]	CWE-426	Untrusted Search Path	4,4
[23]	CWE-502	Deserialization of Untrusted Data	4,3
[24]	CWE-269	Improper Privilege Management	4,23
[25]	CWE-296	Improper Certificate Validation	4,06

Compared to 2011, this year new problems make up about a third of the list. However, most of the threats that were relevant at that time, are still dangerous now.

For example, among them are unlimited downloading of dangerous file types (CWE-434), SQL injection (CWE-89), and command injection (CWE-78). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that many old participants in the threat top still noticeably lose their positions: SQL injections have become less common and have fallen from first place to sixth place; the use of hard-coded credentials, the CWE-798, completely dropped from seventh to nineteenth, compared to 2011.

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