While coding mistakes and errors are not always destructive, many of them can cause vulnerabilities that malicious actors can exploit. A data breach that costs an average of $4.35 million can occur with just one exploitation, vulnerability, or human error — and some predict these breaches will cost $10.5 trillion by 2025. In addition, a single breach can have a significant long-term impact on an organization's ability to generate revenue, as it can give cybercriminals access to products, company data, and consumers’ confidential information, which ultimately damages the brand reputation.
That said, web applications have generally improved in security over the last few years. It’s less often that a single vulnerability leads to remote code execution because attackers would have to chain together multiple vulnerabilities in order to fully compromise a system. These chains are sometimes only made possible because security measures become less rigorous as authentication levels increase.