Beyond CVEs: What Real-World Attackers Actually Look For

Cybersecurity has become obsessed with identifiers—CVEs, CVSS scores, exploit IDs, MITRE mappings. And while those have their place, let me say this clearly:

Attackers don’t care about your CVE list. They care about your blind spots.

Over the years, I’ve seen breaches that had nothing to do with critical CVEs—and everything to do with overlooked logic, chained vulnerabilities, or assumptions no scanner flagged.

At Com Olho, we decided early on: we won’t chase vulnerabilities based on labels. We’ll chase them based on impact.

Here’s what we’ve learned about how real attackers think—and how we built Com Olho to stay ahead of them.

1. Attackers Look for Weak Process, Not Just Weak Code

That outdated staging server exposed to the internet? That forgotten subdomain pointing to a dead third-party? That internal tool with “temporary” credentials hardcoded?

No CVE will flag those. But attackers love them.

At Com Olho, we prioritise environmental risk just as much as software risk. We track exposed surfaces, misconfigurations, forgotten assets, and shadow infrastructure—because that’s where most attacks start.

2. They Chain “Low-Risk” Bugs into High-Impact Exploits

A minor open redirect. A weak rate limiter. An endpoint with verbose error messages.

Individually? Not much. Together? They’re how attackers bypass auth, pivot through systems, or escalate privileges.

We designed our platform to correlate vulnerabilities—not just catalog them. We don’t treat each report in isolation. We look at how they connect, escalate, and amplify each other.

That’s how we find the exploit paths, not just the checklist items.

3. They Study Behaviour, Not Just Binaries

Attackers don’t just scan your stack—they observe your patterns.

They watch login flows. They notice which endpoints are noisy and which ones are quiet. They test how your app responds to edge-case inputs and time-based anomalies.

So we built Com Olho to do the same.

Our behavioral analysis engine learns what normal looks like across endpoints, sessions, and users—so we can detect when something’s intentionally abnormal.

Because behaviour often reveals the breach before a vulnerability does.

4. They Exploit the Gap Between “Detected” and “Resolved”

A report that sits in triage for 3 weeks is still a wide-open door. A misclassified bug marked as “won’t fix” without proper review? That’s a liability.

At Com Olho, we track not just detection—but resolution velocity. We close the feedback loop between ethical hackers, engineering teams, and security owners—so that exploitable issues don’t linger quietly in your backlog.

5. They Don’t Wait for Your Scanner to Catch Up

Automated tools are always a step behind. New techniques don’t get CVEs until they’re widespread. Real attackers? They innovate daily.

That’s why we blend automation with human security intelligence. We rely on researchers, red teamers, and community submissions to surface emerging threat patterns—the ones that haven’t been labeled yet, but are already being exploited.

Final Thought

If your security strategy revolves around chasing CVEs, you’re fighting yesterday’s war.

Attackers think in stories—not scores. In sequences—not severity ratings. And if your tools can’t map that narrative, you’ll always be a step behind.

At Com Olho, we’ve reimagined detection from the attacker’s perspective. Because beating the threat starts by understanding it—on their terms, not ours.