On Average It Takes Half a Year to Fix a Website Vulnerability

According to WhiteHat Security stats, the average time to fix a website vulnerability after it has been reported is 150-180 days.

Remediation is obviously an issue, and the failure to fix (only half ever get fixed) is purely a situation of lack of resources, said Jeremiah Grossman (@jeremiahg), founder of WhiteHat Security, in our conversation at the 2015 Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas.

The reason this happens is companies ask themselves, “Do you have your developers fixing or creating revenue generating features, or do you have them fixing vulnerabilities with known risks?” said Grossman. “They know for a fact that if they don’t create the revenue generating features, they know for a fact they’ll lose money. But if they don’t fix the vulnerabilities they might get hacked, so they go for the sure thing and that’s why those issues remain.”

If you have custom software, there’s no one else to create the patch but you. You need coders to fix it. For WhiteHat Security’s clients, they’re using partnerships to solve the unremediated vulnerability issue in the following three ways:

1. Technology for static analysis, where they find certain issues and can dynamically generate code that clients can copy and paste into their environment.
2. Prevoty, which goes into the client’s software library and provides a protective layer around the application. It’s kind of like a web application firewall.
3. A company that providers coders for hire who solely come in to write code to patch the vulnerabilities.