Exposure Assessment

The CVE Exposure Window Calculator

The next critical vulnerability isn't the problem. The time it takes to protect against it is.

Select your firewall vendor and estimate the operational cost, exposure window, and patching burden created by critical firewall vulnerabilities.

Firewall patching burden

The labor your team spends keeping the firewall appliances themselves current, triage, testing, HA choreography, and fleet-wide rollout.

Firewall vendor

Firewall appliances

120,000

Fully-loaded hourly cost

Advanced options Edit

Routine Patch Cadence 4/yr

1/yr12/yr

Illustrative baseline for routine, non-emergency patch pushes. Does not include Critical/KEV vulnerabilities — those are always treated as immediate, out-of-cycle patches regardless of this setting.

Estimated annual labor cost

$0 / year

Unplanned Maintenance vs. Cato

+0.0 hrs

Low risk

0 remediation hours / yr

Cato delivers FWaaS and patches the platform for you, so there is no appliance fleet to triage, stage, or roll out. This burden drops to near zero.

System exposure during the patch cycle

Cato's Agentic CVE Mitigation (IPS Virtual patching) virtually patches in as fast as 45-min, protecting everything behind the Cato SASE Platform, giving your team time to assess risk and patch.

Current Time to Patch (Exposure Window) days

1 day90 days

CVE Scope

Industry (IBM breach-cost context)

Exploit-exposure hours reduced

0% reduction

0 Exposed today

0 With Cato

0 Hours removed

Exposure today 0 hrs

With Cato virtual patching 0 hrs

Get your customized report

Downloading results gives you:

Your $0 labor cost and 0 exploit-exposure hrs detailed report

[Optional] Schedule a firewall replacement assessment*

*Note: A firewall replacement assessment maps your fleet, CVE exposure, and the hours Cato gives back.

Did you know?

More attacks get in, fewer are fully closed, and closing them takes longer — so the exposure window keeps widening.

Source: Verizon 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report.

31% Initial Access

Exploiting vulnerabilities is now the #1 way attackers break in.

up from 20% last year

26% Remediation

Only a quarter of known exploited vulnerabilities are fully remediated.

down from 38% last year

43 days Time to Fix

And the median time to fully close a critical vulnerability keeps growing.

up from 32 days last year

Methodology

This assessment loads a generated public-source CVE count file and combines it with user-provided environment assumptions. It estimates operational remediation burden; it is not a formal security assessment or guarantee of exposure reduction.

Last updated: 7/16/2026

Results downloaded (.pdf).

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