State of DevSecOps Report: Why 95% of Organizations Suffered Successful Attacks

The Application Security Crisis in Numbers

The Contrast Security State of DevSecOps Report reveals an application security landscape in crisis. Based on a comprehensive survey of development, operations, and security professionals—including C-level executives across 75% enterprise organizations with 2,000+ employees—the findings paint a picture of an industry struggling to secure software at the speed modern development demands. The core tension is clear: organizations are deploying code faster than ever, but their security processes were designed for a slower era and are fundamentally failing to keep pace.

The numbers tell a devastating story: only 5% of organizations experienced zero successful attacks in the past year, meaning 95% of surveyed enterprises were successfully breached through their applications. Meanwhile, 79% of applications in development carry 20+ known vulnerabilities, and over 99% of production applications have at least 4 vulnerabilities. The gap between vulnerability awareness and remediation is enormous—54% of all vulnerabilities and 61% of serious vulnerabilities take more than 90 days to fix—creating windows of exposure that attackers routinely exploit.

For CISOs, CTOs, and engineering leaders evaluating their application security strategies, this report provides both a diagnostic framework and a roadmap for improvement. The findings reveal that the problem is not a lack of security tools—it’s that existing tools create friction, false positives, and delays that force organizations to choose between security and delivery speed.

Vulnerability Prevalence: 20+ Per Application

The scale of vulnerability prevalence across enterprise applications is staggering. In development environments, 79% of organizations report their average application has 20 or more vulnerabilities, with 13% reporting 50+ vulnerabilities per application. Even more concerning, these vulnerabilities persist into production: more than 99% of production applications carry at least 4 vulnerabilities, with 78% carrying between 4 and 25.

The top vulnerability types ranked by risk include SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Broken Authentication, XML External Entities, and Command Injection. While SQL Injection and XSS are familiar threats, Command Injection’s prominence as the second most commonly cited highest-risk vulnerability deserves attention—a successful command injection can enable complete remote takeover of a host. This ranking differs from the OWASP Top 10, reflecting the practical risk experience of security professionals rather than theoretical severity rankings.

Security Scans That Slow Development to a Crawl

91% of organizations report vulnerability scans take 3 or more hours, with 35% reporting 8+ hours per scan. This scanning overhead creates enormous friction in development pipelines. When a single security scan takes a full working day, it becomes a bottleneck that forces teams to make uncomfortable tradeoffs between thorough security testing and meeting delivery deadlines. The result is predictable: 55% of organizations sometimes or often skip security scans entirely to meet deadlines, with only 16% reporting they never skip scans.

The remediation burden amplifies this problem. 62% of developers stop coding to remediate vulnerabilities at least every 2-3 days, with each vulnerability consuming 4+ hours of developer time for 53% of respondents. Beyond remediation, 78% spend at least 3-5 hours per week verifying that fixes actually resolved the vulnerability. This means that a significant fraction of total developer capacity is consumed by security remediation rather than feature development—a resource allocation that creates tension between development and security teams and ultimately degrades both productivity and security outcomes.

The False Positive Problem: 80% Alert Noise

Perhaps the most damaging finding is the false positive rate: 80% of organizations report that at least half of all security alerts are false positives, with 38% reporting that more than 75% of alerts are noise. This alert fatigue has cascading effects throughout the security program. When security teams spend the majority of their time investigating false alarms, genuine threats receive less attention and take longer to address.

Triaging false positives consumes substantial resources. Using SAST tools, 61% of respondents spend 1+ hours per alert on triage and diagnosis. Using DAST tools, 63% spend 1+ hours per alert. In production, the burden is even heavier: 73% of security operations teams spend 3+ hours per alert on triage, correlation, risk rating, documentation, and retesting. These hours represent direct costs that provide zero security value—they are pure waste in the system.

Remediation Timelines: 54% Take Over 90 Days

Remediation timelines reveal a critical prioritization failure. While one might expect serious vulnerabilities to be fixed faster than routine ones, the data shows the opposite: 61% of serious vulnerabilities take more than 90 days to remediate, compared to 54% for all vulnerabilities. This counterintuitive finding suggests that serious vulnerabilities are more complex to fix, require more coordination between teams, or get deprioritized amid the overwhelming volume of security work.

The remediation milestone data is equally concerning. 94% of organizations take more than 60 days to resolve half their vulnerabilities, and 65% require more than 90 days to resolve three-quarters. These extended remediation windows mean that known vulnerabilities remain exploitable for months—ample time for threat actors who increasingly automate exploitation of known vulnerabilities. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report confirms the impact: 43% of data breaches result from web application vulnerabilities, a figure that more than doubled over the previous year.

The Attack Surface: 95% of Organizations Breached

The attack data confirms that the vulnerability and remediation challenges documented elsewhere in the report translate directly into successful breaches. 95% of organizations experienced at least one successful exploitative attack, with 61% experiencing three or more. Applications receive enormous volumes of attack traffic: 64% of organizations see more than 10,000 probes per application per month, consistent with Contrast Labs telemetry showing over 13,000 attacks per application monthly.

The consequences of these breaches are severe. 72% of organizations experienced loss or exposure of business-critical data, 67% experienced operational disruption, and 62% suffered brand degradation. External research corroborates these findings: 42% of companies that suffered a breach attributed it to a known but unpatched vulnerability, according to the Ponemon Institute—highlighting the direct link between extended remediation timelines and breach risk.

DevOps Budget Growth and Team Pressure

57% of organizations increased DevOps budgets due to the COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation, with 35% increasing budgets by more than 10%. This investment reflects the growing strategic importance of software delivery capabilities. However, increased budgets have not resolved the fundamental tension: 79% of teams report being under increased pressure to shorten release cycles and commit more code, with more than 90% of CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, and release managers reporting this pressure.

80% of teams deploy code to production at least multiple times per week, with 47% deploying daily or more frequently. This deployment velocity, combined with the security scan durations and remediation timelines documented elsewhere, creates a mathematical impossibility: organizations cannot both scan thoroughly and deploy frequently with current tooling. Something must give—and the data shows that security is typically what gets sacrificed.

Industry Variations in Security Maturity

Industry comparisons reveal significant variation in security maturity. Finance/Banking (58%) and Healthcare (57%) lead in resolving serious vulnerabilities within 90 days, likely reflecting regulatory pressure and the high cost of breaches in these sectors. Manufacturing (26%) and Media and Entertainment (25%) lag significantly, suggesting that organizations in these sectors may underinvest in application security relative to their risk exposure.

Dedicated application security headcount also varies by industry. Insurance leads at 90%, while Finance/Banking (56%) and Healthcare (56%) actually trail the overall average of 67%. The variation in where security headcount is housed—security team versus DevOps team—reflects different organizational philosophies about where security responsibility should reside, with no clear consensus across industries.

The Staffing Crisis in Application Security

45% of organizations need additional DevSecOps staff but cannot hire due to skills shortages (27%) or budget constraints (18%). Only 32% of organizations feel they don’t need additional staff. This staffing gap compounds every other challenge: longer remediation timelines, more skipped scans, and greater reliance on tools that produce high false positive rates. The collaboration gap is equally concerning: only 43% of respondents describe the relationship between security and development teams in positive terms, implying that 57% of organizations still struggle with basic security-development collaboration.

Building a Modern DevSecOps Strategy

The report advocates for moving beyond legacy application security tools toward an integrated approach featuring continuous monitoring from within applications, elimination of false positives through runtime context, and automatic vulnerability detection as developers write code. This shift from external scanning to embedded instrumentation promises to break the fundamental tradeoff between security thoroughness and development velocity that plagues current approaches.

For organizations seeking to improve their DevSecOps posture, the data suggests three priorities: first, reduce false positive rates to make security alerts trustworthy and actionable; second, embed security testing into development workflows to eliminate the scan-and-wait bottleneck; and third, implement risk-based prioritization to ensure that the most dangerous vulnerabilities receive attention first. The current state—where 95% of organizations are breached and serious vulnerabilities take longer to fix than routine ones—is unsustainable.