Security teams face a critical challenge with 82% of organizations carrying security debt — vulnerabilities that have been open for more than a year. According to Veracode's Chief Security Evangelist Chris Wysopal, the key isn't fixing every vulnerability but reducing exposure time for the most dangerous ones by focusing on critical applications and flaws that combine high severity with high exploitability. The biggest issue isn't the size of the backlog but how long critical vulnerabilities remain accessible to attackers, with third-party code proving especially problematic as it takes an average of 358 days to remediate.