Patching practices are coming under intense pressure of late, as time-to-exploit windows accelerate — a new reality likely to worsen as AI assistance in attack chains rises.
Now cyber defenders have another cause for flaw alarm: Vulnerability exploitation has significantly pulled away from stolen credentials as the most common entry point in security breaches, according to the latest edition of Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR).
Verizon researchers found that exploited flaws were the root cause of breaches in 31% of cases, with credential abuse blamed for 13% of security failures. In a nod to patch management difficulties in the enterprise, only one in four (26%) crit...