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Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

The Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) is a data-driven effort for estimating the likelihood (probability) that a software vulnerability will be exploited in the wild. The EPSS model produces a probability score between 0 and 1 (0 and 100%) for all CVE vulnerabilities. The higher the score, the greater the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited. Additionally percentiles are calculated, which are a direct transformation from probabilities and provide a measure of an EPSS probability relative to all other scores. That is, the percentile is the proportion of all values less than or equal to the current rank. A good overview of EPSS scores and EPSS percentiles is given in Probability, Percentiles, and Binning - How to understand and interpret EPSS Scores. The EPSS data is updated daily.

SecObserve imports the EPSS data and updates all observations with a CVE value with the EPSS score and EPSS percentile regularly. After an import of a vulnerability scan, all observations with a CVE number contained in the import are updated with the EPSS score and EPSS percentile as well.

Configuration

Per default the task to import the EPSS data and update the observations is scheduled to run every night at 03:00 UTC time. This default can be changed by administrators via the Settings. The expressions for BACKGROUND_EPSS_IMPORT_CRONTAB_MINUTES and BACKGROUND_EPSS_IMPORT_CRONTAB_HOURS have to be valid values according to https://huey.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.html#crontab:

  • * = every distinct value (every minute, every hour)
  • */n = run every n times, i.e. hours=’*/4’ == 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20
  • n = run every n (minutes 0 - 60, hours 0 - 24)
  • m-n = run every time m..n
  • m,n = run on m and n

Hours are always in UTC time.