If you’ve ever waded into the world of cybersecurity, you’ve probably run across the acronyms CWE, CVE, and KEV. They sound similar, and they’re all related to security flaws — but each serves a different purpose. Here’s a clear breakdown:

CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration)

Think of CWE as a blueprint of mistakes.

• Maintained by MITRE, CWE is a catalog of weakness types — ways that software or hardware can go wrong.

• A CWE is not tied to a single product; instead, it describes a class of design or coding errors.

• CWEs can be abstract (like “improper input validation”) or very specific (like “integer overflow in arithmetic operations”).

• Example: CWE-269 (Improper Privilege Management), which outlines the general problem of failing to correctly enforce privilege levels.

CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)

CVE zooms in from the abstract to the concrete and specific.

• A CVE is an actual, identified vulnerability in a particular product or version.

• Every CVE entry includes metadata such as:

  • Vendor/Product (e.g., Cisco ASA)

  • Versions affected

  • Description of the flaw

  • Severity score (CVSS)

• CVEs are often mapped back to one or more CWEs, showing which general weakness they stem from.

• Example: CVE-2025-22254 — an instance of CWE-269 in FortiOS 7.4.3, where an attacker with read-only admin rights could escalate to super-admin.

KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities)

KEV is where the rubber meets the road.

• Managed by CISA, the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog is a curated subset of CVEs.

• A CVE enters KEV when:

  • Confirmed exploitation — attackers have used it in real-world incidents.

  • Elevated risk — active exploitation makes it more dangerous than a theoretical flaw.

  • Mandatory remediation — U.S. federal agencies are required to review and patch KEVs, and many private organizations follow the same guidance.

• KEVs often become high-value targets in ransomware campaigns, supply chain attacks, and mass exploitation events.

Putting It All Together

• CWE = the category of mistake (e.g., “improper privilege management”).

• CVE = the specific instance of that mistake in a real product and version.

• KEV = the subset of CVEs that attackers are actively exploiting in the wild.

Here’s the challenge: these data points live in different places, with different levels of abstraction. Making sense of them — and applying them to your own network — can feel like trying to untangle a ball of string.

That’s where Forward Networks comes in. With our platform, correlating CWEs, CVEs, and KEVs across your environment is straightforward and comprehensive. The entire network — routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, SDN platforms, and hypervisors — is covered in one spot, with an at-a-glance view. What used to be a tangled mess of acronyms becomes reachable, contextual, and easy to understand.

Community Question: How do you and your team use CWE, CVE, and KEV in practice? Do you treat KEVs as your absolute patch-now list, or balance them against broader risk-based prioritization?