According to the 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, software vulnerability exploitation is now the #1-way attackers get in.
Not credential theft. Not phishing. Software vulnerabilities. Exploitation now accounts for 31% of all breaches. This is a 55% jump in a single year. Web applications are the entry point in 71% of ransomware cases. Exploitation shows up in 77% of all hacking-related breaches.
Attackers moved from stealing passwords to exploiting code. Code scales. It's everywhere. And most of it has been sitting with known flaws for months or even years.
Here’s the problem: the defense side is going backwards. Only 26% of critical CISA KEV vulnerabilities got fully remediated in 2025, down from 38% the year before. The median time to close a critical flaw hit 43 days, up from 32.
Veracode’s 2026 State of Software Security report found that 82% of organizations now carry security debt: known vulnerabilities sitting open for over a year, up from 74% twelve months prior. 60% have critical security debt, a 20% increase in a single year.
Security debt isn’t slow-moving tech debt that costs you features. It’s risk on the books that attackers are now cashing in.
Veracode’s new Security Debt Demolition Guide is a field manual for getting out from under it in three phases with a 90-day operational plan built on actual data.
To learn more information about the data from both reports, watch our webinar now on demand.
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