Introduction: The Myth of the “Unknown” Breach

When a breach happens, the first question is usually: “How did we miss this?”

In many cases, the uncomfortable answer is: we didn’t.

The vulnerability was:

• Previously identified
• Logged in a ticketing system
• Assigned a severity rating
• Sometimes even partially remediated

Yet it still made it to production—and got exploited.

This pattern repeats across industries because knowing about a vulnerability is not the same as removing risk.

What “Known Vulnerabilities” Really Means

A “known vulnerability” is typically one that:

• Has a CVE or documented weakness
• Was detected by SAST, DAST, SCA, CSPM, or scanning tools
• Appears in dashboards or reports

But “known” does not mean:

• Prioritized correctly
• Owned clearly
• Fixed everywhere it exists
• Verified in production

Security programs often confuse visibility with resolution.

Why Known Vulnerabilities Stay Exploitable

1. Too Many Alerts, Too Little Context

Security tools generate massive volumes of findings:

• Duplicate alerts across tools
• Conflicting severity scores
• Findings without runtime exposure context

Without knowing whether a vulnerability is:

• Deployed in production
• Internet-facing
• Handling sensitive data

Teams default to fixing what’s easiest—not what’s most dangerous.

2. Severity ≠ Exploitability

A “critical” severity score does not automatically mean high risk.

Conversely, many exploited vulnerabilities were:

• Rated medium or low
• Considered “theoretical”
• Ignored due to noise

Attackers don’t care about severity labels—they care about reachability, privilege, and impact.

3. Ownership Is Fragmented

Modern applications span:

• Code repositories
• CI/CD pipelines
• Containers and images
• Cloud infrastructure
• Runtime identities

When a vulnerability appears, teams ask:

• Is this a developer issue?
• A platform issue?
• A cloud configuration issue?

While ownership is debated, the vulnerability remains live.

4. Fixes Don’t Propagate Automatically

Even when code is patched:

• Old artifacts may still be running
• Containers may not be rebuilt
• Multiple services may share the same vulnerable dependency

A fix in one place does not guarantee the vulnerability is gone everywhere it exists.

5. Runtime Drift Re-introduces Risk

Cloud and container environments change constantly:

• Configuration updates
• Scaling events
• Dependency upgrades
• Manual overrides

These changes can silently:

• Re-expose vulnerable paths
• Undo previous mitigations
• Create new attack surfaces

Known vulnerabilities resurface because posture is not continuously validated.

6. Verification Is Often Missing

Many vulnerabilities are marked “closed” based on:

• Code merge
• Ticket resolution
• Scheduled patch

But without runtime verification:

• Teams assume risk is gone
• Attack paths remain open
• Exploitation continues unnoticed

Assumed remediation is one of the biggest blind spots in security.

The Real Problem: Detection Without Decision

Most security stacks are optimized to find problems, not to:

• Decide which ones matter now
• Ensure they are fixed everywhere
• Confirm they stay fixed

This creates a dangerous illusion:

“We’re aware of the risk, so we must be safe.”

Attackers exploit that gap.

What Actually Prevents Exploitation

Organizations that reduce real-world risk focus on:

• Contextual prioritization Prioritizing vulnerabilities based on exposure, identity, data sensitivity, and active threat behavior.
• Clear ownership Automatically routing issues to the teams that can actually fix them.
• End-to-end visibility Knowing where vulnerable code, dependencies, and configurations exist—from source to runtime.
• Continuous verification Confirming that fixes removed the vulnerability in production, not just on paper.

Shifting the Security Question

Security teams must stop asking:

“How many vulnerabilities do we have?”

And start asking:

“Which vulnerabilities are exploitable right now—and why?”

That shift turns vulnerability management into risk management.