In the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, organizations are facing an overwhelming challenge: the growing backlog of unresolved security findings. Despite advances in detection technologies, the gap between identifying security findings and remediating them continues to widen.
Security Findings?
Let’s define what we mean by Security Findings. Sometimes also referred to as vulnerabilities, these security findings are detected by various tools that scan an organization’s code repositories, infrastructure, applications, and cloud environments. Tools like SCA (Software Composition Analysis), SAST (Static Application Security Testing), DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), CNAPP (Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform), and CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) uncover weaknesses such as:
- Code vulnerabilities: Flaws in application code or third-party packages that can be exploited by attackers.
- Configuration issues: Misconfigurations in cloud environments, servers, or applications that expose systems to unnecessary risk.
- Identity-related exposures: Weak credentials or improperly managed permissions that attackers can exploit.
- Exposed secrets: Issues that arise when tokens and secrets are exposed in code and configuration or not rotated regularly.
Resolving these findings is critical for maintaining a secure posture, yet they often pile up faster than organizations can address them. Most of the problem lies not in detection but in what happens next.
Security Team’s Catch 22: Responsibility without Ownership
Security teams are responsible for security. They detect, triage and prioritize findings using these tools, but here’s the catch—they don’t own the code, configurations, or infrastructure they’re responsible with securing. Additionally, in most cases, they won’t know how to fix it or what would be the after effect of any of the changes.
Instead, security teams must pass these findings to engineering teams, software developers or platform engineers, who have the authority and knowledge to implement fixes. However, this handoff is fraught with challenges:
- Volume Overload: Security tools generate an overwhelming number of findings.
- Collaboration Gaps: Security teams often “throw findings over the fence” to engineering teams without clear ownership or actionable context.
- Proving Urgency: Security teams must either convince engineering teams to prioritize fixes or justify delays to auditors by downplaying the severity of unresolved issues.
These dynamics create friction between teams and slows down remediation efforts. Most organizations report limited collaboration between security and development teams and some even describe their relationship as counterproductive.
Why Backlogs Keep Growing
AI-Powered Threats
The rise of AI-driven cyberattacks has exacerbated the problem. Malicious actors now use AI agents to automate vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovery at an unprecedented scale:
- AI tools identify new vulnerabilities, weaknesses and exploits faster. Just 2 years ago the rate was 2000 a month – now it’s closer to 3000.
- AI tools start leveraging and combining these findings together, crafting sophisticated exploits that would be harder to evade.
This surge further outpaces human capacity for remediation. As attackers get faster and smarter, organizations fall further behind.
More Security Tools Highlight The Paradox of Progress
Security vendors employ skilled researchers and analysts to uncover new findings and exploits, which is undeniably beneficial for advancing cybersecurity. However, this constant discovery process feeds into an ever-expanding list of issues that organizations must address:
- Each new finding adds to the pile, making it harder for security teams to prioritize and remediate effectively.
- The result is a cycle where the tools meant to protect systems also amplify the remediation burden often resulting in analysis/paralysis.
Working Around Remediation: The Management Overhead
Even before actual remediation actually starts, security teams often find themselves bogged down by management overhead, which diverts time and energy away from actually resolving findings.
- Triaging Alerts: Security teams spend considerable time reviewing and categorizing alerts to determine their validity and priority. This process is often manual due to lack of trust in the tools’ judgement.
- Identifying Issue Owners: A significant challenge in many organizations is identifying who owns the responsibility for fixing specific issues. This lack of clear ownership leads to delays as teams spend valuable time determining who should address each issue.
Remediating Findings: A Treacherous Road
Remediation is a high-stakes balancing act between security and stability. Fixing findings isn’t just about bumping versions or a simple configuration change. It is about navigating dependencies, handling breaking changes and their consequences, and ensuring business continuity. Any single fix can cascade into failures across interconnected systems.
Validating fixes adds another layer of complexity. Ensuring that fixes effectively address findings without introducing new issues or breaking functionality. This often involves rigorous testing (hopefully) across multiple environments, which is time-consuming, resource-intensive and in most cases involves a lot of failures along the way.
Prioritization – A False Sense of Security
Prioritization is often introduced as the solution to managing the overwhelming number of security findings that organizations struggle to address. However, prioritization doesn’t solve the problem—it exacerbates it. It blindsides many vulnerabilities by pushing them down the list, ignoring critical context and leaving organizations exposed to risks that aren’t immediately visible or that are simple and easy to solve.
The Numbers Game: Overwhelmed by Volume
Organizations now face thousands—or even millions—of findings annually. This avalanche of data is the growing backlog that teams cannot feasibly remediate within their current capacity (and probably never will). Despite automation efforts and prioritization frameworks, the backlog continues to grow because prioritization addresses symptoms rather than the root cause.
So Why False Sense of Security?
A false sense of security emerges when organizations focus exclusively on a small number of prioritized findings while ignoring the larger backlog. With an overwhelming number of issues identified, prioritization often narrows attention to the most critical findings. While resolving these provides a sense of progress, it masks the reality that the majority of findings remain unaddressed. This selective approach can create an illusion of safety—“We’ve fixed the important ones, so we’re fine”—when, in truth, the broader attack surface is still exposed. The sheer scale of unresolved findings means attackers have plenty of opportunities to exploit weaknesses that were deprioritized.
Why a Growing Backlog is Detrimental
Resource and Risk Implications
Resource Drain: Managing backlogs diverts resources from strategic initiatives, leading to firefighting rather than proactive security.
Increased Risk: Unaddressed findings broaden the attack surface, complicating remediation and increasing compliance risks.
In summary, inaction on security backlogs leads to financial, operational, and reputational consequences, ultimately increasing vulnerability to cyber threats and impacting business resilience.
The Cost
Direct Costs: Breaches average $7.29 million, covering investigation, legal, and notification expenses.
Indirect Costs: They harm reputation and revenue, disrupt operations, and can incur major regulatory fines (e.g., GDPR).
Why Existing Remediation Approaches Fall Short
While many organizations have implemented various remediation strategies, these approaches often fail to address the root causes of the growing security backlog. Here’s why current solutions just don’t cut it:
Process Management: A Band-Aid Solution
Many remediation approaches focus on managing the remediation process itself. While this can improve efficiency to some degree, it fails to address the fundamental issues of volume and velocity.
Process management alone cannot keep pace with the exponential growth of security findings, especially given the rise of AI-powered threats.
Generic Solutions Lack Trust, Adoption and Velocity
Existing remediation tools often suggest fixes, but these solutions frequently fall short for two key reasons:
Lack of Specificity: Generic solutions fail to account for the unique aspects of an organization’s infrastructure and codebase. This one-size-fits-all approach often leads to:
- Incompatibility with existing systems
- Potential introduction of new findings
- Resistance from engineering teams who understand their systems better
Insufficient Explanation: Many tools provide fixes without adequate context or reasoning. This lack of transparency:
- Erodes trust between security and engineering teams
- Fails to educate engineers on security best practices
- Leads to reluctance in implementing suggested changes
Low Velocity: Existing remediation processes are often too slow because they rely heavily on manual work. This manual approach leads to:
- Inability to Scale
- Human Error and Inconsistency
- Inability to handle the volume
Will It Break?
A critical shortcoming of current remediation approaches is their inability to guarantee operational continuity:
- No existing solution provides a robust way to verify that systems will continue functioning without interruption after implementing security fixes.
- This lack of assurance leads to:
- Hesitation in applying patches, especially for critical systems.
- Increased dwell time for vulnerabilities as teams conduct manual testing.
- Potential for unexpected downtime or performance issues post-remediation.
These limitations highlight the need for a more comprehensive, trust-building approach to remediation that addresses not just the symptoms but the underlying causes of the growing security backlog. Future solutions must focus on fostering collaboration between security and engineering teams, providing context-aware fixes, and ensuring operational stability throughout the remediation process.
A New Era of Security: Autonomous Remediation
The current state of remediation is unsustainable. Security backlogs grow daily, fueled by detection tools that outpace manual processes. Prioritization, while helpful, fails to address the root problem: the inability to act at scale. The solution lies in autonomous remediation—a transformative approach that bridges the gap between detection and action.
Secnomic’s AI-powered agents embody this shift, automating the resolution of vulnerabilities with speed, precision, context-awareness and verification. These agents don’t just prioritize—they fix. By implementing verified code and configuration changes autonomously, Secnomic eliminates backlogs, reduces exposure windows, and scales effortlessly to meet the demands of modern environments.
Autonomous remediation isn’t just a technological leap; it’s a strategic necessity. It turns security from reactive firefighting into proactive resilience. With Secnomic leading the way, organizations can finally close the loop on remediation, ensuring robust defenses while empowering teams to focus on growth and innovation. The future of security starts here.