You can't control when the next critical vulnerability drops.
You can control how much of your environment is exposed when it does.
The problem is that most teams have more internet-facing exposure than they realise.
Intruder's Head of Security digs into why this happens and how teams can manage it deliberately.
Time-to-exploit is shrinking The larger and less controlled your attack surface is,
The larger and less controlled your attack surface is, the more opportunities exist for exploitation.
And the window to act on them is shrinking fast.
For the most serious vulnerabilities, disclosure to exploitation can be as short as 24 to 48 hours.
Zero Day Clock projects that time-to-exploit will be just minutes by 2028.
That's not a lot of time when you consider what has to happen before a patch is deployed: running scans, waiting for results, raising tickets, agreeing priorities, implementing applies to ’the fix’ too, happy to drop ‘verifying’ if that’s easier.
If disclosure lands out of hours, it takes even longer.
In many cases, vulnerable systems don’t need to be internet-facing in the first place.