Companies Keep Getting Breached by Vulnerabilities They Already Knew About
Help Net Security, Thursday, July 16th, 2026
Vicarius survey finds 79% of organizations were breached via vulnerabilities already sitting in their own inventory.
A Vicarius survey of 300 IT and cybersecurity leaders exposes a sharp gap between finding vulnerabilities and actually fixing them.
Scanning tools surface weaknesses effectively, but 58% of remediation still requires direct human intervention and 82% of organizations cannot consistently remediate within the team that discovered the issue.
The research found 79% of organizations suffered security incidents involving vulnerabilities already in their inventory, with about half of those known for 30 to 90 days.
Organizations that require a verified rescan before closing a vulnerability experienced breaches at rates 40% lower than those using looser definitions of fixed.
The finding points to verification rigor as a meaningful lever on breach risk.