Attackers hit vulnerabilities hard last year, making exploits the top entry point for breaches

Attackers couldn’t get enough of the vulnerabilities at their disposal last year, making exploits the top initial access vector across more than 22,000 breaches Verizon analyzed in its latest Data Breach Investigations Report released Tuesday.

The massive annual study uncovered a surge of exploited vulnerabilities during a one-year period ending in October 2025. Exploited defects accounted for 31% of all known initial access vectors, jumping from 20% the previous year. 

The uptick in exploited vulnerabilities is a reflection of the “sisyphean cause” of vulnerability management, researchers wrote in the report. “Put quite simply, there are often too many vulnerabilities and not enough time for patching all of them.”

Organizations are struggling to keep up with the torrent of vulnerabilities affecting technology across their systems. This slide is especially worrisome, and declining, among defects in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog.

Only 26% of the critical vulnerabilities in CISA’s catalog were fully remediated by more than 13,000 organizations Verizon studied in 2025, marking a drop from 38% the year prior. 

“There is also a worse result for the median time elapsed for a vulnerability to be fully patched by detection,” researchers wrote in the report. “Our new median time is 43 days, almost two weeks longer than last year’s 32 days.”

Verizon also noted that the median number of KEV vulnerabilities that organizations had to patch jumped from 11 in 2024 to 16 in 2025.

CISA’s KEV catalog contained more than 1,500 CVEs as of February, and 65% of those were exploited during the previous year, according to the report.

Verizon identified the five most common weaknesses of CISA KEV CVEs in its report as out-of-bounds read, heap-based buffer overflow, use after free, external control of file name or path and access of resource using incompatible type.

Attacker motivations remained relatively consistent last year, with financially-motivated cybercriminals accounting for 88% of all breaches. Espionage-driven attacks from state-affiliated groups made up the remainder.

“Ransomware continues to be among the most disruptive and impactful types of breaches we see. Not unlike the price of everything from fast food to adult beverages in ballparks, it continues to trend upward,” researchers wrote in the report.

Ransomware accounted for 48% of all breaches last year, up from 44% in 2024. Yet, Verizon observed some positive trends in ransomware as well.

Ransom payments continued to decline, with 69% of victims reporting they didn’t pay, and the median payment slid from $150,000 in 2024 to almost $140,000 last year.

Tracking ransomware remains a challenge for researchers and authorities. 

“There is a growing disconnect between what is being reported and the reality of what has occurred, in no small part due to threat actors reusing old breaches, reposting breaches from other criminal partners and making up breaches out of whole cloth to help increase their notoriety in the criminal world,” Verizon wrote in the report. “We’re beginning to think that these cybercriminals might not be entirely trustworthy.”

Yet, despite the lack of indisputable data on ransomware activity, researchers concluded: “Ransomware is still the yoga pants of cybersecurity — ubiquitous, stubbornly popular and appearing in unexpected places near you.”