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Combining EPSS and Reachability Analysis to Optimize Vulnerability Management | Blog | Endor Labs

Endor Labs breaks down how the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) v3 works — the exploitation telemetry, exploit-DB/GitHub/Metasploit code checks, CISA KEV/Project Zero/ZDI mentions, CVSS vectors, CWE, and social-media signals it ingests to score CVE exploitation likelihood — and shows that an EPSS-threshold (0.088) remediation strategy fixes the same share of exploited CVEs while patching only ~7.3% of known vulnerabilities versus ~82% under a "fix all high/critical" CVSS approach. It then explains a layered workflow: use reachability analysis (call-graph based) to cut findings by ~80% to what's actually exploitable in your environment, then apply EPSS on that reduced set to rank remaining issues by real-world exploitation likelihood, including for third-party/proprietary code where reachability analysis isn't feasible.