Digital Defense, Inc., a leading provider of Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaaS), today announced a new Zero Day Report from CyberSecurity Ventures that provides vulnerability trends, statistics, best practices, and resources for CISOs and IT security teams. The report contains data and comments from industry experts from the Zero Day Initiative, Trend Micro, Black Duck, Gartner, VMWare, Digital Defense, and DARPA, among others. It paints a frightening picture for what's on the horizon as more powerful exploit kits run downstream to less experienced hackers.

The Digital Defense sponsored report highlights several jaw dropping stats, including:

• The application attack surface is growing by 111 billion new lines of software code every year
• Zero day exploits will increase from one per week in 2015 to one per day in 2021.
• More zero day flaws will be found in commercial software produced from companies like Apple and Adobe.
• There will be open source code in 99% of mission critical apps of the Global 2000.

"Widespread use of open source code needs to be approached carefully from a security standpoint," said Mike Cotton, vice president of research and development at Digital Defense. "A block of code can be a component in software written for many kinds of devices, so a zero-day flaw found in such a component can be multiplied many times. You'll typically see a slew of vulnerabilities come out on all types of appliances and platforms."

"Digital Defense is a thought leader around zero day exploits, and their contributions to our report are invaluable," says Steve Morgan, Founder and Editor-In-Chief at Cybersecurity Ventures. "Cybercrime damages are predicted to cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, and zero-day exploits are a growing contributor. We urge CISOs and IT security teams to get proactive -- best they can -- and take zero-days seriously, sooner rather than later."