The security issues we most commonly encounter during assessments.

Over the past three years, our team has conducted numerous security assessments, penetration tests, cloud security reviews, architecture evaluations, and cybersecurity maturity assessments across organizations ranging from startups to highly regulated enterprises.

A common misconception is that today's most significant security risks are driven primarily by sophisticated attack techniques or zero-day vulnerabilities.

In reality, many of the most impactful findings we identify are well-known security weaknesses that continue to appear across organizations of all sizes and industries. What makes these issues particularly concerning is not their technical complexity, but their persistence.

The following are some of the most common and impactful security issues we have observed repeatedly during assessments performed over the last three years.

1. Identity and access management weaknesses

Identity remains one of the most frequently exploited attack vectors. During assessments, we repeatedly identify organizations that have invested heavily in cybersecurity technologies while continuing to rely on outdated access management practices.

Common observations include:

• Permanent administrative privileges assigned to users instead of just-in-time (JIT) elevation models.
• Excessive privileges that exceed business requirements.
• Lack of periodic access reviews.
• Incomplete onboarding and offboarding processes.
• Dormant or orphaned accounts remaining active.
• Shared privileged accounts with limited accountability.

In many environments, privileged permissions accumulate over time without sufficient governance or review. As a result, a single compromised account can potentially provide attackers with extensive access across systems, cloud environments, and business-critical data.

For many organizations, identity security has effectively become the new perimeter.

2. Insecure secrets management

One of the most common findings during both security assessments and penetration tests involves the improper storage and management of sensitive secrets.

Examples frequently include:

• Passwords stored within application source code.
• API keys embedded in configuration files.
• Tokens exposed through environment variables.
• Cloud credentials stored in repositories.
• Long-lived secrets without rotation policies.

In several application security assessments, we have successfully identified sensitive credentials that would allow unauthorized access to internal systems, cloud resources, or third-party services.

The issue is rarely the absence of available solutions. Modern cloud providers and security platforms offer mature secret management capabilities. The challenge is that secure secret management is often not fully integrated into development and operational processes.

3. Lack of effective monitoring and detection

Many organizations believe they are being monitored because they have deployed a SIEM platform. However, during reviews we often discover a significant gap between collecting logs and detecting threats.

Common issues include:

• Critical systems not connected to the SIEM.
• Logging enabled without actionable use cases.
• Lack of environment-specific detection rules.
• Limited correlation between security events.
• Security alerts that are rarely reviewed or investigated.

In practice, an organization may generate large volumes of security logs while maintaining very limited visibility into actual threats. Detection capabilities must be continuously tuned, validated, and aligned with business risks.

4. Incomplete secure development practices

Software development security has improved considerably in recent years, yet secure development programs often remain incomplete. Many organizations perform basic static code analysis but omit other critical controls.

During assessments, we frequently observe:

• Absence of dynamic application security testing (DAST).
• Limited software composition analysis.
• Inadequate review of third-party libraries and dependencies.
• Lack of security testing throughout the development lifecycle.
• Minimal security involvement in architecture decisions.

As software supply chain attacks continue to increase, secure development can no longer be limited to reviewing internally developed code. Organizations must understand and continuously evaluate the security posture of the components their applications depend upon.

5. Insufficient server-side input validation

Application security assessments continue to reveal weaknesses related to input validation and API protection. A recurring pattern involves organizations relying heavily on client-side validation while performing insufficient validation on the server side.

Examples include:

• Business rules enforced only within browser-based applications.
• Missing schema validation within API gateways.
• Insufficient server-side input validation.
• Inconsistent validation across application components.

Because client-side controls can often be bypassed, organizations that rely on them as a primary security mechanism expose applications to unnecessary risk. Server-side validation remains a fundamental requirement for modern application security.

6. Weak network and infrastructure access controls

Despite the broad availability of security best practices, network security misconfigurations continue to appear regularly.

Common examples include:

• Security groups allowing broader access than required.
• Excessively permissive inbound rules.
• Unrestricted outbound internet access.
• Network segmentation that exists on paper but not in practice.
• Firewall policies that have expanded over time without review.

Another recurring observation involves web application firewall deployments. Organizations may invest in WAF technologies while leaving application servers directly accessible from the internet. In such scenarios, attackers may be able to bypass the WAF entirely and communicate directly with backend infrastructure.

We also frequently encounter WAF deployments operating in monitoring mode only, or configured with minimal rule sets that provide limited protection against real-world attack scenarios.

7. Failure to manage and remediate findings

One of the most revealing indicators of security maturity is what happens after an assessment is completed. During recurring assessments, we often identify findings that were previously reported but remain unresolved months or even years later. Even more concerning, similar findings frequently appear across multiple teams within the same organization.

This often indicates:

• Lack of centralized governance.
• Weak remediation ownership.
• Limited executive visibility.
• Insufficient knowledge sharing between teams.
• Absence of structured risk management processes.

Security assessments create value only when findings drive measurable improvement.

8. Uncontrolled adoption of AI services

Over the last two years, the rapid adoption of AI tools has introduced a new category of security and governance risk. Particularly within software development organizations, employees increasingly use AI services to generate code, analyze information, and accelerate daily tasks. However, many organizations have adopted these technologies without establishing appropriate governance.

Common observations include:

• Absence of AI usage policies.
• No defined approval process for AI tools.
• Sensitive data uploaded to external AI platforms.
• Limited employee awareness regarding AI-related risks.
• Lack of monitoring for AI service usage.

As AI becomes embedded within business and development processes, organizations must establish clear controls that balance innovation with security and regulatory requirements.

Final thoughts

Looking across the findings identified during security assessments, penetration tests, and architecture reviews over the last three years, a clear pattern emerges. The most significant risks are rarely caused by advanced attack techniques. Instead, they stem from weaknesses in identity management, secrets protection, monitoring, secure development, infrastructure security, remediation governance, and emerging technologies such as AI.

These are not new problems. Yet they continue to appear across organizations of all sizes and maturity levels.

For CISOs and CIOs, the lesson is straightforward: improving cybersecurity posture does not always require additional tools. More often, it requires stronger governance, disciplined execution, and continuous validation that security controls are operating as intended.