runtime context Research analyzing over 69,000 CVEs found that the time it takes to go from vulnerability disclosure to having a working exploit has dropped from over four months in January 2025 to just half a day by April 2026.
That reality changes what a routine scan-and-patch cycle needs to look like. Rather than checking a system on a weekly or monthly schedule, security teams need to know what’s exploitable on a live system right now.
Security vendors are adapting to a world where a scan-and-patch cycle built for a months-long grace period no longer matches how fast exploits actually arrive. Wiz’s original strength was finding vulnerabilities across cloud environments quickly and broadly. But finding a vulnerability isn’t the same as knowing whether it’s actually dangerous right now, whether it’s loaded into memory and reachable on a live system, not just sitting somewhere in a codebase or container image.
That gap is why Wiz built Sensor, using runtime context to confirm which flagged vulnerabilities are actually live and reachable, rather than leaving the question unanswered.
The Old Scanning Grace Period Is Gone
Traditional vulnerability cycles were fairly predictable. You get an alert, prioritize it against everything else on your plate, and fix it on a schedule that gives your team weeks, sometimes months, to get to it.
But when it takes less than a day for a working exploit to show up after disclosure, that schedule doesn’t make much sense.
Scanner coverage is another problem, according to the same study, as 83.2% of critical vulnerabilities either have no scanner signature at all, or have a working exploit circulating before the signature.
That combination is worse than either problem alone. A faster exploit timeline wouldn’t matter much if scanners still reliably flagged every critical vulnerability first, and a coverage gap wouldn’t matter much if teams still had months to close it. Together, they mean an organization can be doing everything its scan-and-patch process asks of it and still have no idea an exploit is already live on one of its systems.
What Runtime Context Actually Adds
Runtime context fills the missing gaps that most security teams have to work around. Static analysis can estimate whether a vulnerable function is reachable by tracing code paths, but it’s an inference based on how the code is structured. Runtime context replaces that inference with direct confirmation, whether that function was actually loaded and executed on a system that’s running.
That’s very different from a traditional scanner. Code scanners can tell you a vulnerable package exists, but not whether the vulnerable function is ever actually called during real operation. A security team working off severity scores alone might spend days on a “critical” vulnerability that’s sitting in a code path nobody ever calls. Meanwhile, a lower-severity issue with a real path to sensitive data gets a working exploit, and attackers may use it at any time.
Runtime context answers a much narrower and useful question. It connects each finding to evidence from the running system, telling you whether a finding is something you need to worry about right now.
Wiz Sensor works this way, using an eBPF-based agent to watch which packages actually get loaded and executed on a workload. The real value shows up in what a team can safely ignore. A server can report hundreds of critical findings, and if the vulnerable libraries never load, a team can set those aside with confidence, instead of gambling that nothing among them actually matters.
Why This Matters and How Organizations Are Adapting
Runtime context makes a direct difference in how much business risk an organization actually carries. Scanners will flag many issues, so knowing which ones to prioritize based on whether they actually put sensitive data at risk is what separates useful alerts from noise.
Without it, critical issues that can be exploited today may sit in the pipeline for weeks as the security team works through a long list of theoretical findings. It’s simply not an efficient way to do things considering how quickly exploits show up after disclosure.
Luckily, security and AppSec vendors are adapting, giving organizations several ways to close the gap between what’s flagged and what’s exploitable.
Contrast Security applies runtime application self-protection to catch and validate issues as code executes. Oligo Security specializes in runtime-based reachability analysis for open-source vulnerabilities, confirming whether any flagged packages are used in production. Miggo recently added mitigation capabilities that generate and deploy targeted controls at the edge and inside the app itself, aiming to stop exploits within minutes of disclosure.
Wiz’s contribution is connecting runtime validation to the broader cloud and identity context it already maintains, so a confirmed, reachable vulnerability arrives already linked to which sensitive data or systems it could actually expose.
Turning Detection Into Confidence
The gap between disclosure and exploitation will keep shrinking as AI-assisted exploit development takes over. Organizations that truly want to prioritize their security must move away from the mindset of identifying as many vulnerabilities as possible. A lot of that will be noise. What matters is being able to tell in real time which of those vulnerabilities an attacker could use today.