Zero CVEs is an unrealistic and misleading standard
The notion of achieving zero CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) in your systems is fiction. It’s not just difficult, it’s structurally impossible at any scale. And even if you could pull it off for a moment, you’d be putting resources into the wrong fight.
Pushing for zero CVEs often forces teams to rush updates or upgrade components just for peace of mind. This behavior breaks more things than it fixes. New code doesn’t just patch vulnerabilities, it also introduces new ones, brings in bugs, causes regressions, and requires reconfiguration. So, in chasing zero CVEs, organizations trade one form of risk for several others.
Security has to be strategic. Pretending software can be vulnerability-free leads to complacency. The real risk is thinking you’re secure when you aren’t. The enemy isn’t the known flaws in your codebase, it’s the gaps you don’t know about, disguised by that misleading “secure” status on your dashboard.
The executive takeaway here is straightforward: don’t manage by metrics that look good in spreadsheets but fail in the real world. Software will always carry some risk. The focus should be on managing exposure, minimizing attack surfaces, and making your systems resilient.
In 2023, around 30,000 CVEs were recorded. In 2024, the number jumped to nearly 40,000. That growth isn’t about software getting worse, it’s about more developers, more tools (including AI), and more scrutiny. So as the attack surface expands, the “zero” idea becomes increasingly detached from reality. Don’t get stuck fighting the wrong battle.
The explosion in reported CVEs is driven by systemic, industry-wide factors
The rising number of CVEs isn’t a sign that the digital world is collapsing. It’s a signal that systems are getting more complex, and that the environment around security reporting is changing fast. We’re not facing an increase in catastrophic risk. We’re facing an explosion in volume, complexity, and visibility.
What’s driving this? Simple: there’s more code being written by more people. Code generation using AI is accelerating that even further. At the same time, the incentive structure around vulnerability discovery is tilted. Security researchers, students, and even vendors are encouraged, economically, academically, or reputationally, to find and publish weaknesses. This inflates vulnerability counts and distorts the signal.
Security scanning companies add more noise. They compete based on what they can detect, not necessarily on risk severity. The result: CVE alerts often highlight irrelevant or unexploitable flaws because it feels like “more detection” equals “better product.” What it actually does is distract decision-makers and security teams from credible threats.
This environment sets up a kind of feedback loop. AI tools make it easier to find minor flaws. These get logged and counted. Vendors chase patching those flags to maintain clean dashboards. Meanwhile, true system resilience falls down the priority list.
As an executive, what matters is focus: which vulnerabilities truly matter, which systems they affect, and what potential damage they could cause. The number of CVEs is not the threat. Treating it like it is wastes time and money, and doesn’t move you closer to being secure.
Not all CVEs represent meaningful risks; context determines their impact
Not every CVE is a problem worth solving. Treating all vulnerabilities as equal is not strategic, it’s inefficient. Prioritization is everything. A low-severity issue buried deep in a system that’s locked behind layers of access control doesn’t pose the same risk as a remotely exploitable flaw in a mission-critical application. But if your security process treats them the same, you’re misallocating resources.
The fixed mindset that says “every CVE must be patched” creates unnecessary burden. Many CVEs can’t even be exploited under normal conditions. Others are so low-risk that patching them actually introduces more complexity than leaving them alone. Proper context matters. You need to understand the function of the code associated with the CVE: is it a library, a shell program, or a long-running service like a daemon? Each behaves differently, and each carries a different security profile.
Compensating controls can reduce or neutralize the risk tied to a CVE. These might include system configuration, access control, process isolation, or runtime protections. A CVE that seems urgent on paper can become irrelevant in practice when these are in place.
If you’re in a leadership position, the key is this: demand context. Don’t accept vulnerability reports that aren’t tied to business function, operational use, and exploitability. Don’t let your teams waste cycles fixing noise when they could be hardening real targets. Security should be based on exposure and consequence, not just detection volume.
CVE tracking didn’t prevent severe vulnerabilities like the log4j incident
Log4j proved what many already suspected, well-known CVE systems don’t catch everything. CVE-2021-44228, the Log4j issue, wasn’t discovered until 2021, even though the affected code had been out since 2013. Nearly a decade passed, and no vendor, no scanner, no process flagged it. The issue was critical, widespread, and easily exploitable once exposed. But until that moment, everyone had “compliant” dashboards and confidence in their scanner tools. That’s the problem.
A vulnerability hidden in plain sight can do more damage than a dozen low-severity CVEs combined. Log4j wasn’t missed because it was obscure, it was missed because scanning-based cultures look at what’s reported, not what could go wrong. The CVE system didn’t fail to label the bug, it failed to find it at all.
It’s a reminder that known does not equal comprehensive. Your systems contain vulnerabilities that aren’t in any database. Zero CVEs on paper doesn’t mean zero risk, it just means no one’s found the flaw yet. The lesson here is simple: don’t confuse visibility with security.
For executives, trusting process over outcome is risky. Dashboards showing “everything is fine” often rely on assumptions that actual attackers don’t share. Cybersecurity isn’t about finding what’s easy, it’s about preparing for what’s possible. The Log4j delay exposed a blind spot that complacency allowed to grow.
This vulnerability shows that the focus must always extend beyond what’s currently documented. Strategic leadership means asking harder questions: What else are we missing? What are we not reporting? How exposed are we really, and what mitigations exist now in case something deeper goes unnoticed again?
In short, if your security program didn’t catch Log4j, then it wasn’t ready for what’s next either.
Defense in depth is a more effective security strategy than focusing solely on patch-based CVE remediation
Chasing down every CVE without a broader defensive strategy won’t secure your systems. Risks don’t go away just because you deploy a patch. If an attacker gets through, the question you need to answer is: what’s in place to stop them from doing damage?
Defense in depth provides that answer. It’s about layering protections across your infrastructure, making sure no single failure leads to full system compromise. That includes hardened binaries, runtime enforcement, kernel-level protections like SELinux, and system architectures where services are segmented, not piled into a single container or server unnecessarily. These controls reduce the impact of a vulnerability, even one that hasn’t been patched yet.
We’ve already seen real-world effectiveness here. When CVE-2019-5736, a potentially system-compromising container vulnerability, surfaced, some environments were protected simply because SELinux blocked the exploit path. No urgent patch cycle. No fire drill. Protection, by design.
Leaders should understand the difference between patching vulnerabilities and neutralizing them. Properly configured systems don’t just rely on CVE lists. They ensure policies, architecture, and runtime protections are actually stopping bad outcomes. If a patch doesn’t land quickly, the system isn’t left wide open while you wait.
Hardening isn’t optional if you care about continuity. The platforms you deploy matter. Don’t run multiple unrelated services together. Don’t enable SSH by default in containers. Don’t skip OS-level security features because they add setup complexity. The time saved upfront can cost more later.
A system built with layered defenses is hard to break, even when some parts are vulnerable. That’s what resilience looks like. That’s what executives should ask for, security measures that don’t just react, but resist.
Identity-based, social engineering, and infrastructure attacks bypass the traditional vulnerability management approach
You can have perfect patch hygiene and still get breached. Attackers don’t always go after software flaws. Increasingly, they’re going after your people, your access controls, and the misconfigured parts of your environments that sit outside your production services. That includes things like backup systems, domain controllers, legacy endpoints, and even software long past end-of-life.
Credential-based attacks are extremely effective because they bypass technical vulnerabilities and go straight to trusted access. Weak authentication and reused credentials remain common across enterprise systems, even in “secure” builds. If attackers get valid access, they’re not exploiting bugs, they’re using features. There’s no CVE for that.
Social engineering takes this further. Attackers manipulate insiders or trick users into clicking the wrong thing, approving access, or revealing sensitive details. These techniques can undermine even the most technically robust systems. What they exploit isn’t software, it’s the human connection to it.
This is why identity and access management (IAM) is not just an IT function, it’s a fundamental security layer. Centralizing identity systems, enforcing strict access policies, and eliminating weak links like unrestricted shell access or insecure APIs should be baseline priorities, not add-ons.
Then there’s the infrastructure itself. Improperly secured network-attached storage, unmanaged internal services, and lingering misconfigurations all provide footholds. These are often missed in vulnerability scans because they’re operational, not code-based. But attackers don’t ignore them.
As an executive, you want system assurance backed by more than CVE dashboards. Ask about IAM strategy. Ask where uncontrolled access still exists. Make sure the organization is investing in continual training and phishing resilience. Make security posture decisions based on how an attacker would actually go after your enterprise, not how a scanner interprets code.
The zero CVEs mindset can lead to complacency and misallocation of security resources
The push for “zero CVEs” tends to be more about optics than actual security. It’s a clean number that looks good in a report or on a dashboard. But when leadership focuses on that metric, it changes how teams behave, and not in the right way. They start optimizing for appearance instead of resilience.
Teams end up chasing upgrades to stay ahead of scanned vulnerabilities, even when the CVEs are low-risk or irrelevant in context. They trade stability, reliability, and prioritization for the sake of clearing a list. And once that list is empty, the assumption creeps in that systems are safe. This leads to lowered vigilance, delayed investment in deeper controls, and complacency in high-risk areas that don’t show up in CVE scans at all.
Security is execution and context, not checklist results. If your strategy relies on vendor tools reporting “no known vulnerabilities” to claim success, then your organization is defending against the past. The vulnerabilities that matter the most are often the ones not yet discovered or reported. “Zero CVEs” gives a false sense of control over a constantly shifting threat landscape.
Executives must understand that security measurements need to reflect how risk actually behaves, dynamic, unpredictable, and often unreported until it’s too late. The better question is: how quickly can teams respond to unknown events? How well are systems segmented? What’s in place to prevent lateral movement if something breaks?
Investment needs to go where it matters: into detection, identity governance, hardening, and contingency planning, not into artificially clearing public vulnerability logs. What looks good to auditors isn’t always what keeps attackers out.
A risk-based security planning approach is more advantageous than a narrow focus on CVE elimination
If security isn’t tied to risk, then it’s just theater. The goal isn’t patching everything, it’s protecting what matters most. That means understanding where exposure exists, which systems are most critical to operations, and how an incident might unfold if a vulnerability is exploited.
Risk-based security planning puts threat models and business priorities at the center of security design. This means some vulnerabilities will never be patched, and that’s acceptable if compensating controls are in place and the threat doesn’t justify disruption. Conversely, some systems require immediate protection, even if they show zero CVEs, because of the role they play in your infrastructure or the data they store.
A mature program takes inputs from multiple places: vulnerability scans, penetration tests, real-world threat intel, architectural reviews, and insider risk signals. It doesn’t just follow compliance, it informs it. If you defer to metrics like CVE counts, you are letting scanners define priority, rather than aligning security execution to your own operational goals.
Executives should push for a planning culture that asks, “What happens if this system is compromised?” Not, “How many CVEs are listed today?” This shift changes security outcomes significantly. It encourages balanced investments in strong identity management, network segmentation, runtime enforcement, and incident response capability. These are the measures that hold when unanticipated threats emerge.
Risk isn’t abstract. It’s operational, measurable, and linked directly to business performance. If you’re not evaluating it correctly, the rest doesn’t matter. Secure planning starts where risk exists, not where it’s easiest to measure. That’s the difference between reactive policy enforcement and proactive protection.
Concluding thoughts
Security isn’t a finish line, and it’s definitely not defined by the absence of CVEs on a report. If you’re guiding a team, a product, or an entire organization, the question you should be asking isn’t “Are we vulnerable?” It’s “Are we prepared?”
A clean vulnerability scan doesn’t mean attackers can’t get in. It just means no one’s found their way in, yet. Real security starts with understanding exposure, mitigating impact, and building systems that hold up under pressure, not just pass checks.
The goal is operational resilience. That means investing in layered defenses, eliminating weak configurations, tightening access, and preparing for the unknown. It’s not flashy, but it keeps your systems alive when things go wrong.
Use metrics that make sense, ones that map to real risk, not to spreadsheets. Make decisions based on consequence, not compliance. Security isn’t about fixing everything. It’s about fixing what matters before it matters. Make sure your teams are aligned with that.
