Calling it a collapse is perhaps a little melodramatic. It is really about highlighting how the prioritization of vulnerabilities as a solution to your vulnerability management woes is rapidly starting to lose its effectiveness. There is a flood of new critical CVE’s being discovered and the trends point to it getting worse, so your list of CVE’s you prioritize is getting longer and longer. This naturally has a flow on effect
But what does this mean to your program. Well, with more “rushed” patching taking place it increases the gaps in other areas. Resources are finite, so trade offs are expected if you have to devote more time to patching the critical only. As such, during critical CVE floods, certain types of assets that most often will be overlooked due to their perceived lower priority, complexity, or difficulty in patching. These include:
- Legacy Systems and Unsupported Software: Older applications and operating systems that cannot be easily patched or are no longer supported tend to be neglected. These assets remain vulnerable but are often deprioritized even further as they are harder to update or take offline without disrupting operations. They run a very real risk of being forgotten by your vulnerability program all together.[1][2][3]
- Operational Technology (OT) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS): These critical infrastructure components (such as power grids, water treatment, and manufacturing control systems) often lack frequent patching due to potential impact on continuous operations and may be overlooked despite high risk.[4][5]
- Network Equipment and Embedded Devices: Routers, switches, and specialized hardware often receive less attention in vulnerability management because scanning and patching may be more manual and complex. As we have seen this year, these have become more and more of a target at the same time.[1]
- Cloud-Native and Containerized Environments: Rapidly evolving cloud assets and container instances can be missed due to dynamic environments and inventory challenges, leading to gaps in timely patching.[6]
- Public-Facing and IoT Devices: While often directly exposed to risk, these assets can be vast in number and diverse, making continuous tracking and patching difficult, especially under workload or alert fatigue conditions.[7][6]
- Unmanaged or Shadow IT Assets: Devices and software outside centralized control, often neglected during CVE floods due to lack of visibility.[1]
This combination of overlooked asset classes creates blind spots that increase organizational risk during times of vulnerability overload, making virtual patching tools like Innoculator essential to cover these high-risk, hard-to-patch assets without disrupting business continuity.[2][3][8]
