Great Patching Lessons To Learn From The Zero Day Clock

**Executive summary:** The article reviews Zero Day Clock statistics showing that a growing majority of exploited vulnerabilities are zero‑days, less than 1% of public CVEs are ever exploited, and time from public disclosure to first exploitation is now commonly under two days (with AI likely to shorten this further); as a result, organizations must prioritize actively exploited and high‑severity CVEs, dramatically accelerate patching (potentially to same‑day), and adopt compensating controls such as detection and AI‑assisted patch management.