Uncovering Hidden Attack Paths with Vector Databases

Modern cybersecurity defenses face a critical challenge: the sheer volume of vulnerabilities and the limitations of traditional risk assessment. Relying primarily on individual Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores often leads to reactive, inefficient patching cycles. What's frequently overlooked is that the most devastating breaches don't always stem from a single, high-score vulnerability. Instead, they often originate from insidious attack chains, where seemingly minor, low-impact flaws become critical enablers, providing the necessary footholds or information to escalate into a significant compromise. These complex, multi-step attack paths are notoriously difficult to anticipate, prioritize, and defend against using conventional tools.

This presentation introduces an innovative, defensive-focused approach leveraging Vector Databases to revolutionize how security teams understand and manage vulnerability risk. We will demonstrate how these modern data structures can unify disparate intelligence sources, moving beyond static scores to provide a dynamic, contextual understanding of your true attack surface.

The core of our method involves connecting key security intelligence components:

• Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and Common Platform Enumerations (CPEs): Representing your organization's precise software and hardware inventory.
• Granular CVE Details: Encompassing the technical descriptions, impacts, and relationships of vulnerabilities.
• Functional Characteristics of Public Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs): Analyzing the mechanisms and prerequisites described in available exploit PoCs (without executing or sharing malicious code), to understand real-world exploitability.

By transforming these diverse data points into high-dimensional vectors, Vector Databases enable powerful semantic search and correlation. This allows security analysts to perform queries that go beyond simple keyword matches, identifying deep, contextual relationships. For example, a query can reveal how an information disclosure vulnerability (often low-scored) provides the necessary details for subsequent exploitation, leading to a multi-stage attack and potentially full system compromise.

Attendees will gain practical insights into how this approach can:

• Proactively discover and visualize complex attack graphs: Mapping out potential exploit sequences across your specific infrastructure.
• Identify critical low-score CVEs: Pinpointing those "insignificant" vulnerabilities that become pivotal enablers in multi-stage attack chains.
• Uncover novel attack paths: Leveraging the semantic correlation capabilities of VectorDBs to predict and highlight previously unrecognized threat vectors.
• Transform vulnerability prioritization: Shifting from a score-based, reactive model to a contextual, proactive defense strategy that truly understands exploitability within your unique environment.

This session will empower security teams to move beyond mere compliance and reactive patching, equipping them with the intelligence needed to anticipate and effectively disrupt real-world adversary techniques before they impact their organizations.