Why Mythos Finding Vulnerabilities Faster Doesn't Make You More Secure
Every leap in discovery capability tends to widen a gap that already exists. This is the gap between what you find and what you actually fix.
- The average enterprise has a backlog of over 50,000 unpatched vulnerabilities, a number that grows 10–15% annually as discovery tools improve.
- Time-to-remediate for critical vulnerabilities still averages 60–90 days, despite detection times shrinking to minutes.
- Mythos, a representative high-speed scanner, can identify up to 10,000 potential flaws per second, but most organizations can only patch 100–200 per week.
- The Log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) took less than a day to discover but over six months for 50% of affected organizations to fully patch.
- According to industry reports, 80% of exploited vulnerabilities were already known and had available patches—pointing to a remediation failure, not a discovery one.
Frequently Asked Questions
The vulnerability discovery gap is the widening disparity between the speed at which security tools find vulnerabilities and the capacity of organizations to fix them. As discovery tools become faster, the backlog of unpatched flaws grows, increasing overall risk.
Faster scanning can actually harm security if remediation capacity doesn't keep pace. It creates a larger backlog of unpatched vulnerabilities, expanding the attack surface and giving attackers more opportunities to exploit known flaws.
A larger backlog means more known vulnerabilities remain unpatched for extended periods. Attackers often exploit the most recent or easiest-to-fix flaws, and a large backlog increases the chance that a critical vulnerability sits open while the team is overwhelmed.
Organizations can close the gap by investing in automated patch management, prioritizing vulnerabilities by risk, integrating security into DevOps (DevSecOps), and increasing staffing or outsourcing remediation for peak periods.
Prioritization is essential because not all vulnerabilities pose equal risk. Tools like the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and threat intelligence feeds help teams focus on flaws that are actively exploited or tied to critical assets.
Slowing discovery is not recommended, but the focus should shift to balancing discovery with remediation. Organizations should set a 'remediation rate' that matches or exceeds the rate of new findings to prevent backlog growth.
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Original source
www.forbes.com
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