industry madness

Vulnerability Scanner Now Sending Birthday Cards With Unpatched CVEs

Nuno Lopes
Vulnerability Scanner Now Sending Birthday Cards With Unpatched CVEs

SAN FRANCISCO — Leading vulnerability management platform MyVulns has rolled out a new feature that nobody asked for: personalized birthday cards for security analysts featuring a curated timeline of vulnerabilities that remain unpatched since they started their role.

The "Lifecycle Memories" feature automatically generates cards with heartfelt messages like "Another year older, another year of CVE-2019-8324 still in production!" Premium tier subscribers receive embossed cards with actual CVSS scores rendered in metallic foil, with critical vulnerabilities (9.0+) printed in what the company describes as "anxiety red."

"It's actually more personal than what I got from HR," admitted Marcus Chen, a senior security engineer at TechCorp who received nothing from his company but a detailed five-year CVE retrospective from his scanner. The card celebrated both his work anniversary and the matching anniversary of a critical Apache Struts vulnerability still marked as "patch pending—awaiting maintenance window." Chen's card also included a pop-up section featuring his top five "most persistent friends" in the vulnerability database.

Initial reactions have been mixed, with several analysts now hiding their birthdays on LinkedIn to avoid the emotional damage. Three team members at FinanceApp Inc. reportedly cried at their desks upon opening their cards, which thoughtfully included a year-over-year growth chart showing their vulnerability count trending upward at 23% annually. One creative team has started celebrating "CVE birthdays" with cake whenever a vulnerability turns one year old unpatched, though morale improvements remain unconfirmed and several engineers have requested transfers.

"We noticed customers were spending an average of 847 days before patching critical vulnerabilities," explained Jessica Reeves, MyVulns' VP of Product Innovation, during a press conference held in their $4.2 million renovated warehouse headquarters. "Why not commemorate that journey?" She gestured enthusiastically at a roadmap showing the feature was requested by exactly zero customers in their quarterly surveys. "We're just helping teams celebrate consistency. This builds meaningful relationships with our users' technical debt."

The cards include QR codes linking to Jira tickets that have languished in backlog since the Obama administration, along with inspirational quotes like "Time heals all wounds, except these unpatched ones" and "Another year, another reason to implement network segmentation!" A beta feature now sends condolence cards when vulnerabilities finally get patched, mourning "the end of an era" with illustrated tombstones showing the CVE-ID and lifetime duration.

MyVulns has announced plans to expand the feature to include anniversary cards for security incidents and holiday cards featuring "your naughtiest exposed credentials of the season."

At press time, one CISO at a Fortune 500 company had quietly disabled the feature after receiving a card listing every critical vulnerability from their entire six-year tenure. The card was seventeen pages long and arrived with a separate envelope containing confetti shaped like tiny log4j logos.

About the Author

Nuno Lopes

Nuno Lopes

Guest Contributor

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