Your Security Backlog Just Became a Weapon: What the 2025 Exposure Management Report Means for Sensitive Content

Here's something that should make every CISO uncomfortable

That three-year-old vulnerability you've been meaning to patch? Attackers just figured out how to exploit it in less than an hour—thanks to AI-assisted coding tools that turn your backlog into their shopping list.

The 2025 Exposure Management Index from Intruder analyzed over 3,000 small and midsize organizations, and the findings paint a picture that's simultaneously encouraging and alarming. Yes, teams are getting faster at fixing critical vulnerabilities—89% are now remediated within 30 days, up from 75% in 2024. But here's the gut punch: high-severity vulnerabilities are climbing by 19% year-over-year, and attackers have discovered that your "back catalogue" of older CVEs is easier to exploit than ever before.

For organizations handling sensitive content—financial documents, healthcare records, customer data, intellectual property—this shift represents an existential risk. When attackers target internet-facing systems that guard your most valuable data, a single unpatched "high" vulnerability can become the difference between business as usual and a breach notification letter.

Let's break down what the data means for your security program, your compliance obligations, and your ability to protect the content that matters most.

Key Takeaways

1. High-severity vulnerabilities are the new battleground. While critical vulnerabilities have plateaued, high-severity issues surged 19% year-over-year (281→334 average per organization). A "high" on an internet-facing file transfer system or identity provider can be just as devastating as a critical—focus on exposure and consequence, not just severity labels.
2. Your three-year-old vulnerabilities are being weaponized right now. AI-assisted coding has collapsed the time needed to create working exploits from weeks to hours. Attackers are mining the "back catalogue" of older CVEs because they're easier to exploit than discovering new vulnerabilities. That aging backlog isn't technical debt—it's an active threat.
3. Sub-30-day remediation is the new standard—and it's achievable. Organizations now remediate 89% of critical vulnerabilities within 30 days (up from 75% in 2024). North America slashed average fix times from 37 to 16 days. This isn't aspirational—it's the benchmark your auditors will expect you to meet.
4. The "find-fix gap" is your biggest vulnerability. Security teams can discover issues quickly, but only infrastructure and DevOps teams can patch them. Organizations with fewer handoffs, approvals, and bureaucratic friction move twice as fast. Small companies (14 days) outpace mid-sized organizations (17 days) not because of resources, but because of process efficiency.
5. Internet-facing infrastructure is the express lane for attackers. The year's biggest vulnerabilities—ToolShell (SharePoint), Palo Alto PAN-OS, Apache mod_rewrite—all targeted perimeter systems and identity infrastructure. If it faces the internet and touches sensitive data, it needs to be necessary, authenticated, monitored, and patched immediately.

Severity Shuffle: Why "High" Is the New Critical

The headline from the 2025 report isn't subtle: critical vulnerabilities have plateaued, but high-severity issues are surging. Organizations saw their average high-severity vulnerability count jump from 281 to 334—a 19% increase that directly correlates with a 34% rise in high CVEs across the broader ecosystem.

Why should you care about highs?

Because severity ratings are starting points, not destinations. A "high" vulnerability on an internet-facing file transfer system, customer portal, or identity provider isn't just a finding—it's a loaded weapon pointed at your most sensitive data. The classification system tells you how bad something could be; exposure and consequence tell you how bad something will be if exploited.

Consider the anatomy of modern breaches: they rarely start with sophisticated zero-days. Instead, they exploit known vulnerabilities in predictable places—the VPN gateway protecting your document repository, the firewall securing your collaboration platform, the identity provider controlling access to customer files. These systems are deliberately exposed because they need to be accessible. When they're vulnerable, exploitation becomes both widespread and devastating.

For organizations using secure file sharing and communication platforms, this creates a particular pressure point. Your security appliances and perimeter infrastructure aren't just protecting your network—they're protecting the crown jewels of your business. Every unpatched high-severity vulnerability in these systems is an open invitation.

AI-Powered Exploit Factory: Your Old Problems Are New Again

Here's where things get properly unsettling: attackers are increasingly exploiting vulnerabilities that are one, two, even three years old. The reason? AI-assisted coding has dramatically lowered the barrier to creating reliable exploit code. What used to take skilled researchers weeks now takes moderately capable threat actors' hours.

The data backs this up. The 2025 "vulnerabilities of the year" read like a greatest hits album of perimeter and ubiquitous infrastructure:

ToolShell: The Saturday Morning Nightmare

Microsoft SharePoint CVE-2025-53770 demonstrated the anatomy of a modern "perfect storm." Unauthenticated remote code execution on systems often tied to Active Directory, with details dropping on a Saturday when many teams lack out-of-hours coverage. Patch availability lagged disclosure, creating an exploitable window measured in days, not hours.

If your organization uses SharePoint for document collaboration and management, this should terrify you. The first teams to respond had a fighting chance. Those who missed the first few days? They were potentially stepping into active post-exploitation scenarios, with attackers already inside their document repositories.

Palo Alto PAN-OS: When "Fixed" Isn't Fixed

The auth bypass vulnerability (CVE-2025-0108) serves as a brutal reminder that security is never truly "solved." Previous protections added after an earlier bypass turned out to be incomplete. Attackers chained variations in how Apache, Nginx, and PHP process requests to circumvent authentication on management planes.

When authentication fails on a firewall management interface, the blast radius is instantaneous and catastrophic. For organizations protecting sensitive file transfers and communications behind security appliances, this represents a worst-case scenario—the very systems designed to protect your data become the entry point.

Apache mod_rewrite: Ubiquity Breeds Opportunity

CVE-2024-38475 proves that widely deployed components remain the fastest routes to impact. The long tail of Apache installations means application-layer bugs keep showing up in exploit kits because the install base is massive and slow to update.

The through-line connecting these three case studies is crystal clear: internet-facing, identity-adjacent, and widely deployed infrastructure remains the express lane for attackers targeting sensitive data.

Speed Paradox: Getting Faster While Falling Behind

Now for the good news—and there actually is some. Organizations are dramatically improving their remediation speeds. North America slashed average critical-fix times from 37 days to 16 days. Europe is averaging about 100 fewer critical vulnerabilities per organization than North American peers, though they're carrying a higher load of high-severity issues (423 vs. 248).

The 89% of criticals remediated within 30 days represents a genuine achievement. It demonstrates that when organizations streamline processes, empower teams, and remove bureaucratic friction, they can move at the speed required by modern threats.

But here's the paradox: even as remediation speeds improve, the volume and velocity of exploitable vulnerabilities continue to rise. You're running faster, but the finish line keeps moving. For organizations managing sensitive content, this creates a perpetual state of controlled chaos—you're improving, but you can never quite catch up.

Compliance Goldmine Hidden in Your Metrics

For compliance and privacy leaders, the 30-day remediation benchmark represents something more valuable than a security metric—it's auditable evidence of control effectiveness.

Regulators and enterprise customers increasingly demand proof, not promises. They want:

• Asset inventories with ownership clearly defined
• Severity rationale that explains prioritization decisions
• Change approvals with documented business justification
• Remediation timestamps that prove speed of response
• Exception handling that demonstrates risk management maturity

The shift to sub-30-day remediation for critical vulnerabilities creates a practical, measurable objective that auditors can verify. This isn't aspirational—the data proves it's achievable at scale.

For organizations subject to regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, DORA, or NIS 2 Directive, exposure management delivers a critical bridge between security operations and compliance evidence. Every vulnerability discovered, prioritized, and remediated generates artifacts that directly support regulatory compliance requirements around security of processing, operational resilience, and incident response capability.

Consider the specific implications for breach notification risk. Unauthenticated RCEs and authentication bypasses on internet-facing systems—particularly identity providers, file transfer platforms, and management planes—substantially increase the likelihood of personal data exposure. Exposure management doesn't just reduce technical risk; it reduces the probability of triggering breach notification thresholds and the associated regulatory, financial, and reputational costs.

Find-Fix Gap: Where Good Intentions Go to Die

The report reveals an uncomfortable truth about organizational size and remediation speed. In 2024, companies with fewer than 50 employees fixed critical vulnerabilities nearly twice as fast as organizations with 51-2,000 employees (20 days vs. 38 days). By 2025, that gap narrowed to 14 vs. 17 days—progress but still revealing.

Why do small teams move faster? The answer is painfully simple: fewer handoffs, fewer approvals, fewer legacy anchors dragging them down.

Security teams can find and triage vulnerabilities with impressive efficiency. Modern scanning tools, threat intelligence feeds, and automated asset discovery make detection straightforward. But security teams can't fixvulnerabilities—only infrastructure engineers, DevOps teams, and product developers can do that. Each handoff between discovery and remediation adds friction, delay, and potential for the issue to languish in someone's backlog.

The sector-specific data illustrates this dynamic beautifully:

• Software companies are the standout performers, cutting average critical-fix times from 24 to 13 days. Cloud-centric workflows, automated deployment pipelines, and quick rollback capabilities create natural advantages.
• Financial services moved in the wrong direction—from an impressive 14-day average in 2024 to 22 days in 2025. Estate complexity, rigorous change control requirements, and risk-averse culture likely explain the slowdown. When you're managing customer financial data and facing regulatory scrutiny, the pressure to avoid any operational disruption can paradoxically slow down critical security fixes.
• Healthcare services sits in the low-20s for remediation times, facing unique challenges around internet-facing clinical systems and collaboration platforms that can't go offline for extended maintenance windows.
• Professional services showed healthy improvement (29 to 21 days), though maintaining that pace when client work surges remains a challenge.

For organizations handling sensitive content across any of these sectors, the lesson is clear: the distance between your security team and your engineering team is measured in days of exposure. Minimize the handoffs, eliminate the bureaucratic friction, and empower the people who can apply fixes.

Six Actions That Actually Move the Needle

Enough diagnosis—let's talk about what actually works. The organizations achieving sub-30-day remediation and managing their exposure effectively share common practices:

1. Shrink Your Internet Footprint Ruthlessly
   Every internet-facing system is a potential entry point. Audit what's exposed, challenge whether it needs to be, and remove anything that doesn't pass the "necessary and defended" test. For organizations managing secure file sharing, this means ensuring that only properly authenticated, monitored, and defended systems face the public internet.
2. Reweight Your Triage Process
   Critical vulnerabilities still deserve urgent attention, but the surge in high-severity issues means you can't ignore them until you've cleared the critical queue. Prioritize based on:
   • Exploitability (is working exploit code available?)
   • Exposure (is this system internet-facing?)
   • Blast radius (what's the impact if this is compromised?)
   • Data sensitivity (does this protect regulated or high-value content?)

   A high-severity vulnerability on your document management system's authentication layer deserves more urgent attention than a critical vulnerability on an internal test server.

3. Codify Sub-30-Day SLAs With Board-Level Visibility
   Make the 30/60/90-day remediation targets formal policy. Put them in a dashboard that your board reviews quarterly. If you can't measure and report these metrics today, fixing the measurement system is your first priority. The data proves these timelines are achievable—now make them mandatory.
4. Close the Find-Fix Gap
   Move remediation ownership as close as possible to the teams that can act. For critical infrastructure and security appliances, establish pre-approved emergency change windows for perimeter advisories. Document the approval process but make it fast. The difference between a 16-day average and a 37-day average often comes down to how many approval gates you force teams to navigate.
5. Treat Your Vendor Ecosystem Like Your Own Infrastructure
   Third-party risk management and shadow IT expand your attack surface, sometimes invisibly. Asset discovery needs to include supplier estates and "unapproved but in use" services. Contractual SLAs with vendors should reflect the same 30/60/90-day expectations you're enforcing internally. If a vendor manages systems that touch your sensitive data, their remediation speed is your remediation speed.
6. Engineer Compliance From the Beginning
   Capture artifacts as you work: asset lists, severity decisions, timestamps, approvals, exception justifications. Map them to regulatory frameworks and customer requirements from day one. When your exposure management program doubles as your audit evidence repository, your next assessment stops being a fire drill and becomes a simple data pull.

Regional Regulatory Effect

The data suggests something fascinating about the impact of regulatory pressure. European organizations are tracking toward approximately 100 fewer critical vulnerabilities per company than North American peers. Advocates of DORA, NIS 2, and the Cyber Resilience Act will view this as early validation that regulatory frameworks drive behavioral change.

The report is appropriately cautious—it's too early to declare victory, and European organizations still carry higher volumes of high-severity issues. But the trend suggests that external pressure, whether from regulators or demanding enterprise customers, accelerates security improvements.

You don't need a mandate to adopt these practices, but if you're facing regulatory compliance requirements or contractual security obligations, use them as leverage to secure the budget, headcount, and executive support your program needs.

AI Wild Card: Fast Code, Fast Vulnerabilities

Here's an uncomfortable reality: the same AI-assisted development tools that accelerate your software delivery can also accelerate the shipment of vulnerable code. If AI can help your developers ship faster, it can help them ship vulnerable faster.

The solution isn't to ban AI-assisted development—that ship has sailed. Instead, treat AI-generated code like any other supply chain component. Apply the same gated reviews, automated security scanning, and testing requirements to AI-assisted outputs before they reach production. Your vulnerability management program needs to account for the acceleration of both legitimate development and potential security issues.

Three Moves for This Quarter

The data from 3,000+ organizations provide a roadmap. Here's where to focus your energy for maximum impact:

1. Audit your internet-facing infrastructure, particularly systems protecting or providing access to sensitive content. If it's exposed, it should be necessary, properly authenticated, continuously monitored, and defended with current security controls. Everything else should be moved behind additional layers of protection or removed entirely.
2. Reweight your triage toward high-severity vulnerabilities with actual exploit code, especially in older CVEs. The "back catalogue is live" and attackers are recycling three-year-old vulnerabilities faster than you're patching them. Build specific playbooks for the vulnerability classes highlighted in the report—unauthenticated RCEs, authentication bypasses, and vulnerabilities in ubiquitous infrastructure. Then actually practice executing those playbooks.
3. Institutionalize the sub-30-day remediation benchmark for critical vulnerabilities. Put it in policy, practice it in operations, and prove it in audits. Make it a KPI that appears in board dashboards and executive reviews. The data proves this timeline is achievable across organizations of varying sizes and sectors—there's no excuse for slower performance.

Bottom Line: Speed Matters, But Focus Matters More

The 2025 Exposure Management Index delivers a blunt message, and that clarity is valuable. The organizations managing risk most effectively aren't trying to patch every vulnerability—they're cutting internet exposure, prioritizing the vulnerabilities that change outcomes, and making their fixes visible and verifiable.

For organizations handling sensitive content, the stakes are particularly high. Every internet-facing system protecting documents, communications, or data becomes a potential entry point. Every authentication bypass, every unpatched RCE, every old CVE with fresh exploit code represents a direct threat to the content you're entrusted to protect.

The good news? The remediation speeds are improving. The tools exist. The benchmarks are achievable. What separates organizations that succeed from those that struggle isn't budget or headcount—it's focus, process discipline, and the willingness to measure and report on what actually matters.

Your security backlog isn't just a technical debt problem anymore. It's a weapon pointed at your organization by adversaries who can now exploit it faster than you can fix it. The question isn't whether you'll improve your exposure management program—the question is whether you'll do it before an attacker turns your backlog into their breakthrough.