Memory Corruption Issues Lead 2021 CWE Top 25
The MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) team s latest list of most dangerous software flaws includes several that shot up in significance since 2020.
Jai Vijayan
Memory corruption errors remain one of the most common and dangerous weaknesses in modern software.
The MITRE-operated Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute put the issue on top of its latest list of the 25 most dangerous software weaknesses based on an analysis of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) data and severity scores associated with each CVE.
The MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) team counted a total of 3,033 identified security bugs associated with out-of-bounds – or memory corruption issues in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) over the past two years. The vulnerabilities had an average severity ranking of 8.22 on a scale of 10, which meant most were considered serious to very critical. Among other things,