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GRIT’s 2025 Report: Annual Vulnerability Analysis and Exploitation Trends

2024 saw an unprecedented surge in vulnerability disclosures, with over 39,000 vulnerabilities published. While this reflects the industry’s commitment to transparency, it also underscores a critical challenge for security teams: prioritizing and addressing the most significant risks. Amid this overwhelming number, a concerning trend emerged—the exploitation of older vulnerabilities continued to dominate, accompanied by an uptick in social engineering tactics. In this blog, we’ll unpack these trends and provide actionable recommendations to bolster your vulnerability management strategy.

  1. Older Vulnerabilities Still in Play:
    Despite advancements in patching technologies and practices, attackers increasingly exploit long-known vulnerabilities. Many of these weaknesses remain unpatched in production environments due to resource constraints, lack of awareness, or the complexity of patching legacy systems. This highlights the importance of addressing new vulnerabilities and regularly auditing and remediating older ones. Attackers are adept at identifying and exploiting overlooked vulnerabilities to infiltrate systems, often targeting industries where patching is notoriously slow, such as healthcare and critical infrastructure.
  2. Social Engineering Meets Exploitation:
    Attackers combine social engineering techniques with technical exploits, leveraging phishing campaigns to bypass initial defenses and target specific vulnerabilities. This hybrid approach has proven particularly effective in gaining access to systems before executing broader attacks. For example, phishing emails with malicious links or attachments are often used to trick employees into unwittingly providing access credentials, which are then used to exploit vulnerabilities in internal systems. Organizations must address this evolving tactic with equal measures of technical defenses and employee education.
  3. The Role of the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog:
    The KEV catalog has become an invaluable tool for prioritizing remediation efforts. By focusing on vulnerabilities that have been actively exploited, organizations can allocate resources more effectively and address the most pressing threats first. This prioritization strategy is especially critical in environments with limited resources, where addressing every vulnerability is simply not feasible. The KEV catalog also serves as a reminder that staying updated on emerging threats and active exploits is an ongoing necessity for modern cybersecurity programs.

Actionable Recommendations:

  1. Adopt a Threat-Informed Patch Management Approach:
    Leverage threat intelligence to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities based on their exploitability and potential impact. Integrate tools like the KEV catalog into your workflows to ensure high-risk vulnerabilities are addressed promptly. Consider incorporating risk-based metrics into your decision-making processes, such as the likelihood of exploitation or the asset’s criticality.
  2. Focus on Legacy Systems:
    Conduct regular audits of older systems to identify and remediate vulnerabilities. Where patching isn’t feasible, implement compensating controls such as network segmentation and access restrictions to mitigate risk. Many legacy systems remain operational due to high replacement costs or dependency on outdated software. Organizations should balance the risks of maintaining these systems with the potential costs of a security incident stemming from their exploitation.
  3. Enhance Employee Awareness:
    Since social engineering remains a key component of many attacks, continuous security awareness training is essential. Equip employees with the knowledge to identify phishing attempts and other manipulation tactics. Frequent simulations and real-world scenario training can help reinforce these lessons, ensuring employees are prepared to recognize and report suspicious activity promptly.
  4. Automate and Streamline Processes:
    With thousands of vulnerabilities disclosed annually, manual processes can’t keep up. Adopt automation tools for vulnerability scanning, prioritization, and remediation to improve efficiency and reduce human error. Automation also allows for faster response times, ensuring critical vulnerabilities are addressed before attackers can exploit them. By integrating automation with threat intelligence, organizations can gain a more dynamic and responsive approach to vulnerability management.
  5. Collaborate Across Teams:
    Effective vulnerability management requires collaboration between IT, security, and business units. Ensure open communication and shared accountability for addressing vulnerabilities. Encourage teams to align on prioritization criteria, remediation timelines, and reporting practices to create a unified approach to managing risk.

The sheer volume of vulnerabilities disclosed in 2024 presents both a challenge and an opportunity for organizations to refine their security strategies. By focusing on exploited vulnerabilities, addressing legacy systems, and integrating automation, security teams can stay ahead of attackers and protect their critical assets more effectively. A proactive, collaborative, and informed approach to vulnerability management is no longer optional—it’s a necessity.

Read the full report here to learn more about these trends and explore additional insights.