Why not? Those big security vulnerabilities are going to be discussed in years to come, might as well come up with something a little more catchy than CVE-2017-

Why not? Those big security vulnerabilities are going to be discussed in years to come, might as well come up with something a little more catchy than CVE-2017-5753. I guess they could've gone with more descriptive names. At least "spectre" and "meltdown" will be memorable even for non-technical people (who should probably be aware of the issue even if they don't understand the technical details). "Bounds check bypass" and "branch target injection" probably sound like random words stringed together for most people.