Each year, Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) helps security leaders make sense of how threat actors are breaching systems, what tactics are trending, and where to focus defenses.
The 2025 report underscores a clear trend: breaches are increasingly driven by application and product security failures, particularly those tied to third-party software, secrets exposure, and unpatched vulnerabilities. This puts a spotlight on the need for stronger safeguards across the software lifecycle, including end-to-end visibility, risk-based prioritization, and secure software supply chain practices.Â
Below are the five most relevant takeaways for application security, and how Cycode helps organizations stay ahead.
1. Third-Party Risk Is Rising, and Vendors Must Take Ownership of Security
This year’s DBIR found that 30% of breaches involved third-party software or services — twice as many as the previous year. Verizon emphasizes the growing need for vendors to deliver secure software and for buyers to demand evidence of it during procurement.
What this means for application and product security teams: Secure software must start at the source, and visibility into third-party components is non-negotiable.Â
Cycode addresses this challenge with end-to-end software supply chain security, helping teams identify vulnerabilities and risks across first-party and third-party code, before it enters production.
2. Attackers Are Exploiting Vulnerabilities Faster Than Organizations Can Patch
Vulnerability exploitation is now the second-most common breach vector (20%), just behind stolen credentials. And while remediation is improving — with 32–38 days to patch critical vulns — attackers are much faster, with a median of 5 days to mass exploit. The gap between detection and action is where breaches happen.
What this means for application and product security teams: You can’t just scan. You need to prioritize fast, fix early, and prevent breaches before they happen.
Cycode helps teams close that gap with modern scanning across SAST, SCA, IaC, and containers, paired with risk-based prioritization that surfaces the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited.
3. Secrets Exposure Is Creating a Persistent and Growing Breach Risk
The DBIR confirms that credential abuse remains the top access vector, and secrets exposure is a major enabler. In one case, secrets leaked on GitHub had a median exposure time of 94 days before remediation. Long-lived secrets in code, repos, or pipelines give attackers persistent access.Â
What this means for application and product security teams: Secrets management and detection must be continuous, automated, and built into your workflows, not treated as an afterthought. Unfortunately, according to Cycode’s State of ASPM 2025 report, secrets detection remains a top blindspot for security leaders.
Cycode automatically detects and prevents secrets exposure across codebases, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure, helping security teams reduce exposure time and lock down non-human identities.
4. Secure Development is a Customer Expectation and Competitive Advantage for Software Vendors
Verizon stresses the need for security to be part of the vendor selection process. Incidents like MOVEit and SolarWinds show how insecure software can create widespread operational risk with attackers targeting the software supply chain and software vendors to exploit downstream customers and users.
What this means for application and product security teams: Secure-by-design is becoming a market expectation, and proving it isn’t just a technical checkbox. It’s a competitive differentiator that builds trust and drives customer confidence.
Cycode helps organizations operationalize secure development practices and prove software integrity with tools for code-to-runtime mapping, material code change tracking, and compliance reporting.
5. Prioritization is Helping, but Context and Automation Are Needed to Close the Security Gap
As we noted in the second takeaway, the DBIR highlights a growing gap between exploitation speed and remediation timelines. Attackers can mass exploit vulnerabilities in just 5 days, while remediation efforts for critical issues like CISA KEV vulnerabilities take 32–38 days.
But this isn’t just a patching problem. It reflects a deeper issue: teams struggle to connect the dots between vulnerabilities, code, assets, and actual exposure. Prioritization without full context leaves critical risks hiding in plain sight.
What this means for application and product security teams: Improving prioritization is a great start — but without visibility and context, it’s still not enough to stay ahead of modern threats.
Cycode closes this gap with instant-on visibility, code-to-runtime mapping, and its Risk Intelligence Graph (RIG), which powers contextual prioritization across your entire application ecosystem. Combined with automated remediation built into dev workflows, teams can move faster and fix smarter.
Future-Proof Your Application Security with Cycode
The 2025 DBIR confirms what modern security leaders already know: you can’t protect what you can’t see, prioritize what you don’t understand, or trust what you didn’t build securely.
Cycode is the only Complete ASPM platform purpose-built to solve these challenges — from securing your code and dependencies to hardening your pipelines and protecting your production environments.
Book a demo now to learn how Cycode helps you fix what matters most or download The State of ASPM 2025 report to get even more insights into what’s top of mind for security leaders.
