I'm convinced you can tackle 5-10 "CVEs" a day, make a little dashboard, put some pretty graphs on it, and send it to your exec team and probably get accolades. Nevermind that the CVEs had nothing to do with your product.

My favorite urgent must fix CVE from compliance was a bug in the Linux PCMCIA driver on some EC2 VMs.

I don’t say it’s the case there (it probably isn’t, you probably need hardware access or root), but sometimes those sorts of things do actually matter because there’s a way of causing them to be run anyway.

This is why it’s good to exclude things you don’t need. The less there is, the fewer places there are for problems to lurk.

Not against fixing it, but at the next normal update, it an emergency.

Why is that even part of the image?

It was a stock/default kernel setup, before my time.

This is how Vanta et al. make millions.

I don't think Vanta itself even scans for CVEs? They scan for compliance which includes tooling that may look for CVEs, like Dependabot.

Scanning companies should be sophisticated enough to distinguish invalid CVEs and back ported fixes.