Mitre has released its rundown of the most widespread and critical vulnerabilities in software, many of which are easy to find and can be exploited by cyber criminals to take over systems, steal data or crash applications and even computers.
he 2021 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses details the most common and most impactful security issues.
The list is based on published Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) data, as well as data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores of the CVEs.
Top of the list with the highest score by some margin is CWE-787: Out-of-bounds Write, a vulnerability where software writes past the end, or before the beginning, of the intended buffer. Like many of the vulnerabilities in the list this can lead to corruption of data and crashing systems, as well as the ability for attackers to execute code.