Beyond CVSS With EPSS, SSVC, And Real Attack Signals (Brandon Parsons & Pedro Kertzman)

CVSS can scream “critical” while the real risk in your environment is quietly sitting somewhere else and threat actors know it. We sit down with Brandon, a former United States Marine Corps intelligence specialist and longtime cyber threat intelligence practitioner, to get brutally practical about what actually drives smart vulnerability prioritization in 2025. We talk through why vulnerability management is so hard at scale, where EPSS and SSVC help (and where they can mislead), and why the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog is a solid baseline but not the standard by itself. Brandon shares the products he screens for because attackers keep coming back to them: Citrix NetScaler, VMware ESXi and vCenter, Veeam Backup and Replication, Fortinet, Ivanti, file transfer tools, RMM software, and high-impact on-prem deployments. The throughline is adversary incentive: if taking out backups or gaining initial access raises the odds of a payout, expect fast “dogpiling” once research and proof of concept exploits hit the public. Then we pivot into the phishing and social engineering wave: device code phishing kits that steal refresh tokens and access tokens, Microsoft Teams phishing that abuses trust, callback phishing that hides the danger in a phone number, and the growing use of burnable infrastructure like workers.dev and pages.dev. We also dig into the dark web economy behind phishing as a service and why some groups are literally hiring English-speaking social engineers. Subscribe, share this with a teammate who owns patching or identity, and leave a review so more defenders can find the show. What’s the one vulnerability or phishing tactic you’re most worried about right now?Send us Fan MailSupport the showThanks for tuning in! If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. Got thoughts or questions? Connect with us on our LinkedIn Group: Cyber Threat Intelligence Podcast—we’d love to hear from you. If you know anyone with CTI expertise that would like to be interviewed in the show, just let us know. Until next time, stay sharp and stay secure!