Guide
Security debt, meaning flaws left unresolved for more than a year, now affects 82% of organizations, up from 74% a year earlier and the steepest annual jump in the history of Veracode's State of Software Security report. Critical security debt, flaws that are both severe and highly exploitable, has climbed to 60% of organizations. This field manual draws on the 2026 report, an analysis of 1.6 million applications and 141.3 million raw findings, and argues that AI is about to turn that backlog into a target list: models can now surface dormant flaws at machine speed, while only 55% of AI-generated code passes basic security tests. Fixes are not keeping pace, with an average fix half-life of 243 days, rising to 358 days for third-party code. The guide sets out a Prioritize, Protect, Prove framework, from triaging the most exploitable flaws first and blocking vulnerable dependencies to making security debt a board-level KPI, and closes with a 90-day plan and benchmark targets such as a fix half-life under 90 days for critical flaws.
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