At CymetricAI, we believe traditional vulnerability management is no longer fit for purpose. If your security program still relies solely on CVSS base scores, you’re trying to protect a dynamic, hybrid enterprise with tools built for a different era.
Let’s be clear: CVSS was never designed to understand your business.
It’s a theoretical score — disconnected from your actual environment, blind to compensating controls, and completely unaware of your unique attack surface. Meanwhile, the threat landscape has exploded: with 80+ new CVEs daily and vulnerabilities increasing 20% year-over-year, organizations are overwhelmed. And while scanners detect millions of issues, breaches still happen — often via the vulnerabilities no one flagged as “critical.”
We’ve seen this story too many times. CymetricAI was founded to change the script.
A Wake-Up Call from the Field
One of our founding advisors, a former Fortune 100 CISO, described a turning point in 2022:
“We were fixing millions of vulnerabilities per month, yet falling further behind. The volume of ‘critical’ alerts made prioritization impossible. The Board wanted to know how we’d keep up — and the honest answer was: we couldn’t. Not with the old playbook.”
The conclusion was inevitable: vulnerability management needed a paradigm shift. Not more alerts. Not prettier dashboards. A smarter, risk-aware system that sees what truly matters.
CymetricAI: Context Is Everything
At CymetricAI, we combine AI, graph-based attack modeling, and real-time data from your environment to deliver what CVSS alone never could: contextual risk prioritization.
Yes, a CVE might have a base score of 9.8, but:
- It’s in an isolated subnet behind multiple firewalls
- It’s not exposed externally
- The asset is monitored 24/7 and protected by EDR
- It isn’t business-critical
→ Risk to your business? Minimal.
Now flip it: a low-severity CVE on an internet-facing production server with no compensating controls?
→ That’s your real threat.
The Future: Risk-Driven, Not Score-Driven
CymetricAI doesn’t throw more alerts at your team — we eliminate noise. We surface what’s exploitable, reachable, and impactful in your environment, right now.
Because your business doesn’t run on theoretical scores.
And your security strategy shouldn’t either.
Why Contextual Risk Beats Theoretical Scores — Every Time
When security controls work in concert, the impact is transformative. What starts as a base CVSS score of 8.5 can be cut nearly in half, down to 4.4, once compensating controls are accounted for — from firewalls and segmentation to endpoint protection and cloud isolation. That’s a -4.1 delta, not from patching, but from smart architecture.
But here’s the flip side: when controls are misconfigured, outdated, or absent, that risk rises. Fast.
So how do we know — at scale — if our controls are actually working?
This is where traditional tools fall flat. CymetricAI was built to solve exactly this challenge.
EPSS: A Step Forward — But Still Just One Piece
The Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) is a welcome evolution. By moving away from static severity scores and toward probabilistic risk, EPSS gives organizations a 30-day forecast of which vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited.
- A CVE with an EPSS score of 0.8? That’s an 80% chance of real-world exploitation this month.
- A CVE with 9.8 CVSS but a 0.001 EPSS? Statistically safe — for now.
Powered by machine learning models trained on actual exploitation data — including vendor, exposure, popularity, and attacker behavior — EPSS is dynamic, updated daily, and infinitely more actionable than CVSS alone.
But even EPSS is incomplete. It tells you what’s likely to be exploited, not whether you’re actually exposed.
CymetricAI: Closing the Gap Between Exposure and Action
At CymetricAI, we take it further. We blend:
- Real-time threat intelligence (like EPSS)
- Compensating control validation (what’s really protecting you)
- Network reachability and attack paths
- Runtime presence and asset criticality
→ To deliver risk scores that reflect reality, not theory.
In one real-world incident, our system flagged a vulnerability with a 7.5 CVSS and a 0.52 EPSS as top priority — because it was on a production server, externally exposed, and lacked isolation. Another vulnerability rated 9.8 CVSS had near-zero exploit probability and was deep inside a segmented lab — we de-prioritized it.
That’s context-aware risk management.
Operationalizing Modern Vulnerability Management
The goal isn’t to fix everything. It’s to fix what matters most, first — and defer the rest with confidence.
Using CymetricAI, organizations have:
- Reduced “critical” and “high” patch volume by 90%
- Shifted patching cycles to align with business risk
- Freed IT from endless fire drills and focused on meaningful risk reduction
We don’t just surface vulnerabilities — we map them to real attack paths, validate defenses in place, and tell you when you’re actually at risk.
The Future Is Contextual
CVSS alone won’t get you there. EPSS helps, but it’s not enough.
CymetricAI is the platform that connects all the dots — vulnerabilities, controls, threat intelligence, and business impact — into a single, actionable view of risk.
So the next time a scanner dumps 4,000 “critical” issues on your team’s plate, you won’t panic.
You’ll know exactly what to fix, when to fix it, and why.
