Your Network's Smallest Cracks Are Now Its Biggest Threats Bad actors have flipped the script by concentrating more on low-risk threats. Here's how to address the threat and the tactics. Before I joined Skybox in 2011, I specialized in cybersecurity at IBM and several smaller companies, helping enterprises measure network performance and manage security events. Back then, backdoors looked like backdoors: Networks were comparatively straightforward, and if you took the time to map them, big threats were fairly obvious in sizes and numbers. That's no longer the case. Hackers have flipped the script on security teams by exploiting their focus on high-severity vulnerabilities. As noted in a recent report, traditional remediation practices tackle only critical- and high-severity vulnerabilities — roughly 60% of the total — while leaving 40% of supposedly lower-tier vulnerabilities unpatched for prolonged times. Armed with this knowledge, attackers target tiny cracks, turning them into backdoors for increasingly complex attacks that have increased at record rates.