The Public Sector Has the Highest Proportion of Security Flaws of Any Industry

We recently launched the 12th annual edition of our State of Software Security (SOSS) report. To draw conclusions for the report, we examined the entire history of active applications. For the public sector data, we took the same approach. We examined the entire history of applications for government agencies and educational institutions.
We found that the public sector has the highest proportion of security flaws of any industry. On average, most industries have flaws in approximately 76 percent of their applications – but that number is 8 percent higher for the public sector at 82 percent.
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As you’ll see in the figure above, the public sector also has a lower-than-average proportion of flaws actually fixed, and it takes significantly longer to remediate flaws.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into the remediation of open-source flaws. Remediating open-source flaws appears to take a while for every industry. In fact, for most industries, 30 percent of vulnerable libraries remain unresolved…