Across the 141 recently-disclosed vulnerabilities in our verified corpus that CISA later confirmed exploited in the wild, the median time from NVD publication to KEV listing was 5 days.
34 of 153 (22%) were listed as exploited at or before their NVD record was even published — exploitation that ran ahead of public disclosure.
Time from NVD publication to KEV listing
n = 153 vulnerabilities in our corpus with both an NVD publication date and a CISA KEV listing date.
Why we report the median, not the mean
Two different things land a CVE in KEV. Most are recently disclosed and confirmed exploited within days (median 5 days, n = 141). A minority are old vulnerabilities CISA back-catalogs years after disclosure — a 2008 CVE added in 2026 carries a ~6,500-day “lag” that describes cataloging, not exploitation speed. Those 12 legacy cases drag the mean to hundreds of days while the median stays a robust 7 days across the full sample. We report the median and show the whole distribution so you can see both populations.
Method & what this sample is
Lag = (CISA KEV dateAdded) − (NVD publication date), in days, per CVE. Both dates come straight from NVD and the CISA KEV catalog — authoritative sources, never generated.
This is a convenience sample: the 153 KEV vulnerabilities in our verified corpus for which we hold an NVD publication date — not the full 1730-entry KEV catalog. It reflects the vulnerabilities we cover, which skew recent, so treat it as indicative of current exploitation tempo rather than a census. Snapshot as of 2026-10-01.
Which vendors are exploited most → · How we verify