Verizon 2025 DBIR: Tenable Research Collaboration Shines a Spotlight on CVE Remediation Trends

The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) reveals that vulnerability exploitation was present in 20% of breaches — a 34% increase year-over-year. To support the report, Tenable Research contributed enriched data on the most exploited vulnerabilities. In this blog, we analyze 17 edge-related CVEs and remediation trends across industry sectors.

Background

Since 2008, Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) has helped organizations understand evolving cyber threats. For the 2025 edition, Tenable Research contributed enriched data on the most exploited vulnerabilities of the past year. We analyzed over 160 million data points and zeroed-in on the 17 edge device CVEs featured in the DBIR to understand their average remediation times. In this blog, we take a closer look at these vulnerabilities, revealing industry-specific trends and highlighting where patching still lags — often by months.

In this year’s DBIR, vulnerabilities in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and edge devices were particular areas of concern, accounting for 22% of the CVE-related breaches in this year’s report, almost eight times the amount of 3% found in the 2024 report.

Analysis

The 2025 DBIR found that exploitation of vulnerabilities surged to be one of the top initial access vectors for 20% of data breaches. This represents a 34% increase over last year’s report and is driven in part by the zero-day exploitation of VPN and edge device vulnerabilities – asset classes that traditional endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendors struggle to assess effectively. The DBIR calls special attention to 17 CVEs affecting these edge devices, which remain valuable targets for attackers. Tenable Research analyzed these 17 CVEs and evaluated which industries had the best and worst remediation rates across the vulnerabilities. As a primer, the table below provides this list of CVEs and details for each, including their Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and Tenable Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) scores. It’s worth noting that each of these CVEs was added to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list in 2024.