Most enterprise AppSec teams are drowning in a backlog of over 100,000 open findings. The math is relentless: applications accumulate roughly 17 new vulnerabilities each month, while teams resolve only 6, leaving nearly half unpatched a year later. For two decades, detection has outpaced remediation, and this gap compounds with every sprint.
The landscape has shifted because of who is now scanning those backlogs. AI-equipped attackers have slashed the cost and increased the frequency of probing these vulnerabilities; launching an attack against a disclosed CVE now costs about the price of a lunch. Relying on static CVSS scores — a historically weak signal — is no longer viable against automated tools that never tire.
This guide introduces a three-step runtime-exploitability approach: Identify what is actually exploitable in production, collapse the backlog by re-sorting based on these findings and continuously defend the remaining high-risk items while remediation is scheduled. The goal is to shrink the active queue by an order of magnitude without increasing real-world exposure.