The Growing Risk of Security Debt

Security debt is emerging as a critical concern for IT and security teams. As businesses rapidly adopt new technologies, many carry forward legacy systems, unpatched software, and outdated security practices. These unresolved vulnerabilities accumulate over time and can spiral into significant risk, financial loss, and compliance failures. 

This blog explores what security debt is, how it builds up, the dangers it poses, and how organizations—particularly in heavily regulated sectors—can manage and reduce it. 

What Is Security Debt? 

Security debt refers to the backlog of unresolved security issues that arise when organizations prioritize speed, innovation, or convenience over comprehensive security practices. This can include outdated software, misconfigurations, legacy code, or unpatched vulnerabilities.  

Like financial debt, security debt accumulates interest: the longer it’s left unaddressed, the more complex and costly it becomes to remediate. 

However, security debt is broader than just technical flaws. It also stems from organizational shortcomings, such as delayed patch cycles or insufficient security training, that increase overall risk exposure. Unlike technical debt, which affects system performance, security debt raises the likelihood of breaches, regulatory penalties, and reputational damage. 

How Security Debt Builds Up 

Outdated Software and Third-Party Components 

A major contributor to security debt is the continued reliance on outdated libraries and systems that are no longer supported or updated. The infamous 2017 Equifax breach, which was linked to an unpatched Apache Struts vulnerability, is a stark reminder of how a single outdated component can have massive repercussions. 

According to Veracode’s 2024 report, 42% of active applications contain security debt, and 11% of those issues are classified as critical. These risks are amplified in environments that heavily use third-party software without rigorous vetting or lifecycle management. 

Delays in Patching 

Patching remains one of the most consistent challenges in security debt management. Complex dependencies between systems can delay updates, and limited resources force teams to make tough decisions about what gets fixed and what doesn’t. According to a Bitsight report, over 60% of known exploited vulnerabilities are remediated after deadlines provided by CISA. Depending on the severity, organizations took nearly 1.5 years to remediate some vulnerabilities. 

Development Pressures and Risky Shortcuts 

Fast-paced software development cycles often favor rapid delivery over security. This mindset encourages developers to use shortcuts, like hardcoded credentials or skipping input validation. 

Why Security Debt Is Dangerous 

Greater Cyber Risk 

About 60% of breaches exploit known, unpatched vulnerabilities. As attackers become more sophisticated, many use automation to seek out and exploit these long-standing weaknesses. Left unmanaged, they expand the organization’s attack surface and raises the probability of a major incident. 

Compliance and Regulatory Penalties 

Security debt often results in non-compliance with industry regulations such as GDPR and NYDFS 500, which require timely vulnerability management. Fines for GDPR violations can exceed $20 million.  

Operational Drag 

Teams dealing with significant security debt can end up spending significantly more time on reactive tasks like incident response. This diverts focus and resources away from long-term innovation and strategic projects.  

Strategies for Reducing Security Debt 

Shift-Left Security Integration 

Embedding security early in the software development lifecycle (known as “shift left”) can significantly reduce the introduction of vulnerabilities. This typically includes incorporating security models and automated solutions (e.g. SAST and DAST) into continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. 

Automate Vulnerability Management 

Automated systems can continuously scan networks, assets, and applications for known vulnerabilities, classify them by severity, and flag high-risk issues based on exposure and business impact. This allows organizations to reduce the time between discovery and remediation, preventing small issues from compounding into larger, systemic ones. 

Improve Vendor Oversight 

Security debt can also come from third-party dependencies. Enforcing SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials), demanding regular vulnerability disclosures, and requiring timely patching in vendor contracts are crucial for minimizing inherited risk. 

The Role of Network Observability in Security Debt Reduction 

By offering real-time visibility across hybrid environments, observability platforms empower teams to identify, prioritize, and remediate issues at scale. 

Asset Discovery and Risk Mapping 

Modern networks are complex and distributed, creating fragmented visibility. Network observability tools aggregate telemetry from sources all across the network to build a real-time inventory of all connected assets. This eliminates blind spots by ensuring no asset escapes vulnerability scans. 

Prioritization Based on Context 

Not all vulnerabilities warrant immediate attention. Observability platforms enrich CVSS scores with network-specific context: 

• Is the vulnerable system exposed to the internet? 
• Does it handle sensitive data? 
• What downstream services depend on it? 

This contextualization helps teams focus remediation efforts on high-impact debt, avoiding wasted effort on low-risk flaws. 

Critical Use Cases 

In sectors where uptime and trust are essential, observability supports key use cases: 

• Threat Detection: ML baselining helps flag early signs of exploitation 
• Legacy Modernization: Mapping dependencies helps safely retire legacy systems 
• Third-Party Oversight: Monitoring B2B traffic ensures compliance with SLAs and reduces inherited risk 

And by measuring metrics like Mean Time to Patch and Attack Surface Score, CISOs can track ROI on observability investments. 

Concluding Thoughts 

Security debt is a persistent and growing challenge, but not an insurmountable one. With the right mix of automation, observability, organizational discipline, and metrics, businesses can transform security debt from a looming liability into a manageable metric.  

Interested in learning more about how automation can help detect issues faster? Check out our webinar on behavioral anomaly detection with AI.