There is a growing urgency across the cybersecurity landscape as two massive trends converge: a shortage of skilled personnel and a tidal wave of newly discovered vulnerabilities. According to projections, by the end of 2025, there will be close to five million unfilled positions for cybersecurity engineers worldwide. Even when organizations manage to fill these openings, there is no guarantee that the new hires will have the precise expertise needed to handle the onslaught of threats. This intense talent shortage collides with the reality that tens of thousands of new software vulnerabilities are disclosed each year, many of which can be exploited ever more quickly, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI).
With an insufficient workforce and a volume of vulnerabilities that continues to climb, organizations find themselves at a critical juncture. The only viable long-term strategy is for businesses to adopt platforms and processes that reduce human intervention. The logic is straightforward: if attackers harness AI to create and deploy exploits at previously unimaginable speeds, defenders cannot rely solely on manual, people-driven methods to detect and remediate these threats. We must pivot from a model of human-versus-machine to one of machine-versus-machine.
In this blog I will explore how Vicarius’s approach to vulnerability and patch management within an exposure remediation platform addresses this urgent need by prioritizing a broad range of remediation options, seamless integrations, and a commitment to preemptive defense.
The Workforce Challenge
Cybersecurity talent gaps have made headlines for years, but the shortfall is accelerating. By the close of 2025, estimates point to over five million unfilled security roles if current gap growth rates continue. As a result, existing security and IT teams are under tremendous strain. They not only have to keep up with everyday maintenance tasks but also respond to an ever-growing stream of high-priority vulnerabilities.
Even when you successfully hire a cybersecurity engineer, there is no guarantee that this individual will immediately master the organization’s unique security posture, its preferred tools, or the intricacies of emerging attack techniques. The situation can be daunting. If there simply are not enough skilled people to go around, the question naturally arises: how can organizations defend themselves effectively?
Too Many Vulnerabilities, Too Fast
On top of the staffing crisis, the sheer number of vulnerabilities discovered each year is skyrocketing. Not long ago, it was notable if 10,000 new vulnerabilities were disclosed in a 12-month period. Now, 40,000 new issues a year is the norm, and monthly disclosures regularly reach 4,000 or 5,000. Worse still, malicious actors are leveraging AI to develop exploits in days or even hours after new vulnerabilities are announced.
A sobering real-life experiment confirmed this accelerating threat. A researcher used an AI model to ingest a newly discovered vulnerability’s technical details and automatically generate a working exploit code. That exploit was then tested on live, public IP addresses and it worked. This proves the barrier to sophisticated hacking is drastically lowering, and it is plausible to imagine a single individual controlling a “fleet” of AI-powered hacking bots, scanning and exploiting thousands of systems at scale with minimal human oversight.
Machine vs. Machine: Why Automation is Inevitable
If hackers can build exploits in minutes, organizations cannot wait weeks or months to patch critical systems. Many companies still pride themselves on patching major vulnerabilities in two weeks, an improvement on older timelines measured in months but it is no longer sufficient. Attackers can create an exploit much faster than defenders can schedule a patch or manual fix.
To keep pace, organizations need to embrace an automated, AI-powered approach to finding and remediating vulnerabilities. Essentially, if the “time to exploit” is shrinking toward near-instant, the “time to remediate” has to move in the same direction. This drives a necessary shift: real-time detection combined with immediate, automated responses. The ultimate goal is to shrink Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) to zero and drastically reduce the workload on staff by as much as 90%.
True Remediation Means Options
Vicarius’s exposure remediation platform recognizes that effective remediation goes beyond simply “applying a patch.” A real-world environment features countless nuances: legacy systems, mission-critical software that cannot easily be taken offline, or technology stacks that require multiple layers of approval. Sometimes patching is available but risky. Other times, there is no patch at all. True remediation must offer multiple options, such as:
1. Patch Management: When patches are released and tested, applying them is often the most straightforward way to reduce risk.
2. Configuration Changes: Adjusting settings (disabling certain services, closing ports, or requiring stronger credentials) can block exploits without waiting for or applying an official patch.
3. Patchless Protection: Virtual patching or “patchless” techniques can shield a vulnerable system at the network or host level, effectively neutralizing an exploit path, even if the core code remains unchanged.
By offering more than one remediation path, organizations gain crucial flexibility. They can weigh factors like downtime, business impact, and existing operational tools to choose the best fix. This multi-option strategy leads to better overall outcomes. It also mitigates the tension between security teams that need vulnerabilities fixed yesterday and IT/Ops teams that worry about stability and performance disruptions.
Better Together: Integrations that Preserve Existing Investments
An unfortunate reality in security is that new tools often demand “rip and replace,” forcing organizations to abandon prior investments. Vicarius believes in a “better together” approach. Instead of compelling customers to discard their existing vulnerability scanners or patch solutions, the Vicarius platform integrates seamlessly with well-known tools. This integration strategy enables customers to:
- Retain Discovered Vulnerabilities: Organizations can continue using the scanners they already trust. Vicarius ingests these scans and provides enriched analysis, prioritization, and remediation options.
- Orchestrate Patching: For organizations that already have a patch management process, Vicarius can automate and enhance it rather than duplicating efforts.
- Leverage Existing Processes: If you already have automated workflows or ticketing systems, Vicarius hooks into them. This reduces friction and speeds adoption.
- Leverage Vicarius native solution: Take advantage of Vicarius’s built-in scanning, patch management, and patchless protection. This integrated, end-to-end approach complements your existing vulnerability scanners, delivering broader coverage and greater remediation flexibility all while preserving your prior technology investments.
The end result is a unified exposure remediation framework that maximizes existing technology investments while offering powerful new capabilities to fill in the gaps.
Moving from Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management
Even with zero known software vulnerabilities, a misconfiguration like default credentials or an exposed management port can be just as dangerous. That is why leading-edge solutions focus on “exposures,” which encompass vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, weak credentials, and more. If attackers can exploit it, it is an exposure that must be addressed.
Vicarius is expanding beyond standard vulnerability management to include compliance checks (for example, mapping to CIS Benchmarks), configuration audits, and eventually custom compliance profiles. The platform’s vision is to help organizations see all potential entry points, not just CVEs in need of patches. Once discovered, the same flexible remediation framework applies. The wider the net for exposures, the more effectively you can preempt attacks.
Autonomous Remediation: The Endgame
The next phase in the cybersecurity arms race is autonomous remediation. While few organizations today are fully comfortable handing over patching and configuration changes to an AI-driven system, this is the direction we must head. Machines will attack, so machines must defend.
In practical terms, Vicarius envisions a scenario where the platform not only detects a critical vulnerability but also suggests multiple possible fixes. Perhaps one is a straightforward patch but carries a certain risk of downtime, while another is a firewall rule update that is safer but might be partial coverage. Over time, organizations will feed these decisions back into the platform, training it to propose the best course of action automatically. Ultimately, you might set business rules that define a certain “risk appetite,” letting the AI autonomously choose and implement the best remediation path.
This approach is especially important given that some exposures cannot be patched at all think of IoT devices, printers, or old endpoints for which the vendor no longer releases updates. AI-driven orchestration can seamlessly shift to alternative controls, like network segmentation or intrusion prevention system (IPS) adjustments, to mitigate those risks.
Preemptive Defense with Real-Time Remediation
The convergence of a steep cybersecurity talent shortage and an exponential rise in vulnerabilities accelerated by AI-assisted exploit creation means organizations must automate. Manual processes cannot keep up with machine-speed attacks, and partial, patch-only strategies leave too many gaps.
Vicarius addresses these challenges by offering:
- A real-time exposure remediation platform that aims for Mean Time to Detection = 0
- Multiple remediation options, from patching to configuration tweaks, to patchless protection
- Seamless integration with popular scanners and tools, ensuring a “better together” approach, leveraging and expanding upon the customers earlier investment
- A vision for machine-to-machine defense, where AI autonomously orchestrates fixes
Hackers can now unleash entire fleets of exploit bots at scale, so defenders need equally powerful AI-driven solutions that slash manual workloads by 90%. A preemptive defense strategy where vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are automatically discovered, prioritized, and remediated represents the best path forward. The stakes are too high, and the pace of attacks too fast, for anything less. By embracing Vicarius’s machine-against-machine approach, organizations can position themselves not just to respond but to stay ahead of modern cyber threats, preserving both their security posture and their limited human resources for the tasks that truly require human expertise.
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