The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams has officially released CVSS v4.0, the next generation of its Common Vulnerability Scoring System standard, eight years after CVSS v3.0, the previous major version.

CVSS is a standardized framework for assessing software security vulnerabilities’ severity used to assign numerical scores or qualitative representation based on exploitability, impact on confidentiality, integrity, availability, and required privileges, with higher scores denoting more severe vulnerabilities.

Several supplemental metrics for vulnerability assessment have been added including Automatable, Recovery, Value Density, Vulnerability Response Effort and Provider Urgency.”

This latest version also adds a new nomenclature, with Base, Base + Threat, Base + Environmental, and Base + Threat + Environmental severity ratings.

The complete list of all changes shipping with the CVSS v4.0 standard, including finer granularity through new Base metrics/values and better impact metrics, is available here.

FIRST unveiled CVSS 4.0 in June, during its 35th annual conference in Montréal, Canada, as a “Cyber sector game-changer,” 18 years after the release of CVSS version 1 in February 2005.