The Disclosure Theater: Why Our Vulnerability Management Is Built on a Fantasy

The security industry just discovered something uncomfortable: while we debated 90-day disclosure windows, attackers were sitting on VMware exploits for over a year. This isn't an outlier. It's a feature of modern vulnerability management, and it reveals how fundamentally broken our entire approach has become.

We've built an elaborate theater around vulnerability disclosure that assumes we're racing against time to patch before attackers discover flaws. But what happens when this premise is completely false? What happens when sophisticated attackers already have working exploits while we're still arguing about responsible disclosure timelines?

The answer is that we continue the charade anyway, because admitting the truth would require rebuilding everything.

When the Clock Started Ticking a Year Ago

Recent analysis suggests that exploits for critical VMware zero-day vulnerabilities were likely developed and in active use roughly a year before their public disclosure. While security teams scrambled to apply patches within their carefully planned maintenance windows, state-sponsored actors were already deep inside networks, moving laterally and establishing persistence.

This isn't a story about a sophisticated attack campaign. It's a story about the gap between security theory and reality. The entire responsible disclosure ecosystem assumes that public revelation of a vulnerability starts the exploitation clock. In reality, that clock started ticking when someone competent first looked at the code.

The VMware case illuminates a harsh truth: the vulnerability management process as practiced today is optimized for an adversary model that stopped being relevant years ago. We're fighting yesterday's script kiddies with yesterday's assumptions about discovery timelines.

The Comfortable Lie of Disclosure Windows

The security community has spent decades refining responsible disclosure practices. We've established 90-day windows, negotiated coordination protocols, and built elaborate systems for tracking CVE assignments. These processes make intuitive sense if you believe vulnerability discovery follows a predictable pattern where security researchers find flaws first and attackers catch up later.

This belief is demonstrably false for any vulnerability that matters.

Advanced persistent threat groups don't wait for CVE publications to build their toolkits. They invest in reverse engineering, source code analysis, and systematic weakness discovery. By the time a vulnerability receives a CVE number, professional attackers have often had working exploits for months or years.

The disclosure theater provides comfort to defenders who can point to patch deployment metrics and compliance dashboards. It creates the illusion of control over exposure windows that closed long before anyone realized they were open.

Consider the typical enterprise response to critical vulnerabilities: emergency change control meetings, testing phases, and carefully orchestrated deployment schedules. These processes make sense if you're racing against time. They make no sense if the race ended a year ago and you didn't know you were running.

The Intelligence Gap That Changes Everything

The VMware revelations highlight something more disturbing than just delayed disclosure: the fundamental intelligence gap between defenders and attackers. While enterprises debate patch windows, adversaries are conducting systematic vulnerability research with longer time horizons and different success metrics.

This isn't a resource problem that money can solve. It's a structural problem with how we think about vulnerability lifecycles. The security industry has convinced itself that vulnerability discovery is a race where everyone starts from the same starting line. In reality, it's more like a marathon where some participants got a several-mile head start and aren't required to announce when they cross the finish line.

The intelligence asymmetry goes deeper than just timing. Professional attack groups often understand vulnerabilities better than the vendors who created them. They invest in understanding root causes, identifying variant classes, and building reliable exploitation techniques. Meanwhile, defenders get a CVE description and a patch that may or may not address the underlying issue class.

When VMware published patches for these vulnerabilities, defenders celebrated closed exposure windows while attackers likely moved to their backup exploitation methods or shifted focus to the next vulnerability in their pipeline.

Why Faster Patching Isn't the Answer

The natural response to the VMware timeline is to demand faster patching cycles and shortened disclosure windows. This response misses the point entirely and actually makes the problem worse.

Accelerating patch deployment without addressing the intelligence gap creates new failure modes. Organizations that rush to deploy patches often introduce configuration errors, skip testing phases that catch integration issues, and create operational instability that attackers can exploit. The pressure to patch quickly also reduces the time available for understanding whether patches actually address root causes or just individual instances.

More importantly, faster patching reinforces the illusion that defenders can meaningfully compete on attacker timelines. This is a competition that defenders cannot win because they're optimizing for different objectives. Enterprises must maintain operational stability, compatibility, and reliability while attackers only need exploitation to work once against a specific target configuration.

The focus on patch speed also distracts from more fundamental questions about architecture and resilience. If attackers have had working exploits for a year, the critical question isn't how quickly you can deploy patches. It's whether your detection capabilities would notice a compromise, whether your network segmentation would contain lateral movement, and whether your backup and recovery processes could survive a determined adversary.

The Counterargument: Better Than Nothing

Critics will argue that existing disclosure practices, while imperfect, still provide value by establishing minimum standards for vendor response and creating pressure for timely patches. They're correct that current processes are better than the alternative of indefinite vulnerability secrecy.

The coordinated vulnerability disclosure process does serve important functions beyond just timing. It creates standardized communication channels between researchers and vendors, establishes expectations for patch quality, and provides a framework for prioritizing security updates. These benefits have real value even when the underlying timing assumptions are wrong.

There's also an argument that public disclosure, even if delayed, eventually levels the playing field by giving defenders access to exploitation details that help improve detection and response capabilities. Some organizations do use CVE publications to enhance their security monitoring and incident response procedures.

But acknowledging these benefits doesn't change the fundamental problem: we've built an entire risk management framework on assumptions that don't match reality for the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk. The process works adequately for run-of-the-mill software flaws that casual attackers might stumble upon, but fails completely for the systematic vulnerability research conducted by professional adversaries.

What Actually Matters: Resilience Over Reaction

If we accept that sophisticated attackers often have significant head starts on vulnerability exploitation, the logical response is to shift from reaction-based security models to resilience-based approaches that assume compromise rather than trying to prevent it.

This means investing in detection capabilities that can identify novel attack patterns rather than just known indicators. It means network architectures that limit blast radius regardless of the specific vulnerability being exploited. It means backup and recovery processes that can restore operations even when attackers have had extended access to systems.

The vulnerability management process should focus less on disclosure timelines and more on understanding attack surface reduction, exploitation prerequisites, and defensive controls that remain effective even when specific vulnerabilities are being actively exploited.

Organizations should assume that any critical vulnerability published today has likely been known to professional attackers for months or years. This assumption changes risk calculations, architectural decisions, and operational priorities in ways that actually improve security posture instead of just providing the appearance of responsiveness.

The Path Forward: Honest Risk Assessment

The security industry needs to abandon the comfortable fiction that vulnerability disclosure creates meaningful race conditions between defenders and attackers. Instead, we should build security programs that assume sophisticated adversaries already have capabilities we don't know about and may never discover through traditional disclosure processes.

This doesn't mean abandoning responsible disclosure practices entirely. It means repositioning them as one component of a broader risk management strategy rather than the cornerstone of vulnerability management programs.

The VMware timeline should serve as a reminder that in security, the threats we can see and measure are often less dangerous than the ones operating outside our visibility. Building resilience for unknown capabilities is harder than optimizing response times for known vulnerabilities, but it's the only approach that makes sense when dealing with adversaries who operate on different timelines and with different constraints.

The disclosure theater will continue because it serves organizational needs for measurable security activities and compliance frameworks. But security practitioners should understand it for what it is: a useful administrative process rather than a meaningful defense against competent adversaries who don't wait for CVE announcements to begin their work.

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