Monitor Critical CVEs by Product

A useful monitor remembers what it saw. The NVD CVE Scraper supplies structured snapshots from NIST's official NVD CVE API 2.0; your workflow decides what counts as a change.

Define the state

Use CVE ID as the stable key; watch new records plus changes to CVSS, last-modified time, affected CPEs, and KEV status. Save the input beside each snapshot so a query change is not mistaken for a source change. Schedule the saved Apify Task at the source's actual update cadence. Hourly polling is wasteful for a feed that changes daily.

On each successful run:

1. Load the previous successful dataset.
2. Join on cve_id.
3. Separate new records, changed records, and records that disappeared.
4. Alert only after applying the business filters.
5. Retain the raw snapshot and run ID for investigation.

Do not replace the previous snapshot after a failed or empty run. An upstream outage otherwise looks like mass deletion.

Keep alerts useful

Use cve_id for idempotency and keep last_modified for change detection. Enrich with asset owners after collection, then create tickets only when product matching and exposure checks pass.

Alert payloads should include the source identifier, the fields that changed, the old and new values, and a direct source URL. That is enough for an owner to verify the event without opening the raw dataset.

CVSS is technical severity, not your business risk. Join results to an asset inventory and consider exposure, exploit status, ownership, and compensating controls before opening remediation tickets.

Measure alert precision for the first few weeks. If reviewers repeatedly dismiss the same pattern, tighten the source query or the routing rule. Hiding noise after it enters the alert channel is harder than excluding it at collection time.