The European Union has taken a significant step toward cybersecurity sovereignty with the launch of the European Vulnerability Database (EUVD). Announced on Tuesday by the EU’s cybersecurity agency ENISA, the database is designed to centralize reliable, actionable information about IT, OT, and IoT product vulnerabilities across the continent. While industry experts see the potential, they stress that staying operationally relevant will be ENISA’s biggest challenge.
Mandated under the EU’s NIS2 Directive—which outlines cybersecurity risk and incident management obligations for critical infrastructure—the EUVD promises aggregated insights on vulnerabilities, including their exploitation status and mitigation steps. The resource is open and free to all, consolidating data from vendors, incident response teams, and leading sources such as MITRE’s CVE Program and CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. As of 2024, ENISA also became a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA), granting it the ability to assign new CVE identifiers directly.
Complementary Not Competitive with CVE and NVD
Though the timing of the EUVD’s launch coincides with concerns around the U.S.-based CVE Program and funding issues at NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD), experts emphasize that ENISA’s initiative is intended to complement—not replace—existing systems.
“It makes sense that the EU would want a regional vulnerability database,” said Patrick Garrity, a researcher at VulnCheck. “Even if it overlaps with CVE, it provides tailored control and visibility for European stakeholders.”
Garrity added that the EUVD was built in coordination with the CVE Program, even as many in the industry have criticized the CVE and NVD for delays and data quality concerns. VulnCheck itself maintains an expanded KEV list with nearly three times more entries than those found in the EUVD or CISA’s database, based on SecurityWeek’s analysis.
Other experts echo the value of redundancy in a globally connected threat landscape. Nathaniel Jones, VP of Security & AI Strategy at Darktrace, described the database as “a win for the global cybersecurity community.” According to Jones, having multiple sources prevents single points of failure and could reduce reporting delays—critical when time-sensitive exploits emerge.
Key to Success: Relevance, Integration, and Signal Quality
Still, the EUVD’s long-term utility hinges on its ability to offer more than just another record of known vulnerabilities. Experts warn that without tight integration into existing security workflows, the EUVD risks becoming just another silo.
Julian Brownlow Davies, VP at bug bounty platform Bugcrowd, noted that security teams need “better signal, not more databases.” He cautioned that the EUVD must prioritize real-time updates, enriched threat context, and streamlined access to truly support operational security efforts. “Databases like KEV and VulnDB already offer advanced exploit prioritization—ENISA will need to match that rigor to be useful,” he said.
So far, the launch of the EUVD is being welcomed as a step toward greater regional resilience in vulnerability intelligence. However, its success will depend on sustained investment, data quality, and how well it integrates into the tools and workflows used by security teams across Europe and beyond.
