Technical Debt Is Cyber Risk in Disguise

Technical Debt, Cybersecurity, and Software Vulnerabilities 

Technical debt rarely announces itself as a security problem.

It usually appears as something more familiar: an old system that still works, a temporary integration that became permanent, code that nobody wants to touch, documentation that was never completed, or an upgrade that keeps moving to the next quarter.

Individually, these decisions may look reasonable. The problem is what happens when those decisions accumulate.

Technical debt is commonly described as the cost created when organizations prioritize short-term objectives over longer-term technical quality. Recent research defines it in terms of delayed technical work and poor solutions adopted to achieve immediate objectives, with additional effort appearing later as the “interest” on those decisions.

For CISOs, that interest can include cyber risk.

When Technical Debt Becomes a Security Problem: “Old but Gold” Doesn’t Work Anymore

Legacy technology often survives for a good reason: reliability, integration into business processes, individual applications, familiarity.  All these make replacement difficult.

Research describes technical debt as accumulated maintenance obligations originating in shortcuts and temporary solutions. As systems evolve, that debt can consume increasing amounts of the IT budget, leaving fewer resources available to resolve the underlying problem. Debt can accumulate through obsolete software, poorly designed code, undocumented system changes, excessive customization, and the integration of new systems into obsolete architecture. Over time, dependencies become harder to identify and increasingly expensive and risky to change.

A legacy system does not become a cyber risk simply because it is old. The risk comes from what has accumulated around it: unsupported components, architectural dependencies, difficult updates, missing knowledge, fragile integrations, and the growing operational cost of making changes safely.

Eventually, the organization may know that something should be fixed while becoming progressively less able to fix it.

How Technical Debt Increases Cybersecurity Risk

Technical debt often begins with a tradeoff: accepting an imperfect implementation to meet a launch deadline, keeping an existing dependency to avoid delays, or deferring refactoring because the code still works. 

Those decisions can be rational at the time.

The problem is allowing a temporary compromise to become an unmanaged permanent condition.

Asatiani and colleagues describe how technical debt can increase architectural rigidity, reduce development efficiency, and create additional maintenance obligations. They argue that the issue becomes self-reinforcing: resources are increasingly consumed maintaining debt-heavy environments, while fewer resources remain available to reduce the debt itself.

From a security perspective, the important question is therefore not whether an organization has technical debt. Almost every mature environment does.

The question is which debt is beginning to affect the organization’s ability to secure, update, understand, or change its systems.

Where Technical Debt Meets Software Vulnerability 

Technical debt is often discussed as a software-quality or maintenance problem. Recent empirical research gives CISOs another reason to pay attention.

A 2025 IEEE Access study examined real-world code and vulnerability data from six software projects. The researchers analyzed technical-debt indicators including code smells, bugs, software metrics, and refactoring activity and found a significant association between technical debt and software vulnerabilities.

The results are especially important because the study looked at actual vulnerable code changes rather than treating technical debt only as an abstract engineering concept.

Code smells were particularly informative. The researchers found that including code-smell information improved vulnerability-prediction models and concluded that code smells were strong indicators of security risk in their dataset.

That means the separation between technical quality and cybersecurity is weaker than organizations sometimes assume. Poor design choices, accumulated complexity, bugs, and unresolved technical weaknesses can create conditions in which vulnerabilities become more likely or more difficult to detect and remediate.

For a CISO, that makes technical debt relevant to risk prioritization.

Cyber Risk Can Hide Inside the IT Backlog

Most organizations already track some components of technical debt.

They may appear in engineering tickets, modernization programs, architecture reviews, patching queues, end-of-life inventories, exception registers, or infrastructure roadmaps.

The problem is that these records are often viewed independently, with each issue assigned to a different team. 

Taken separately, none may appear critical. Taken together, they may describe an environment that is becoming increasingly difficult to secure.

This is where the CISO has a different role to play.

The objective should not be to move every technical-debt item into the cyber risk register. That would create another backlog rather than improve decision-making.

Instead, CISOs should identify the debt that changes security exposure.

That includes asking whether a technical limitation prevents timely remediation, increases dependence on unsupported technology, makes security changes unusually risky, reduces visibility into system behavior, or creates dependencies that could expand the impact of a compromise.

Technical debt becomes particularly relevant when it begins restricting the organization’s security options.

Managing Technical Debt as a Cyber Risk 

Some Debt Is Worth Carrying 

Technical debt is not inherently evidence of poor management.

Sometimes accepting debt is the right business decision.

A company may deliberately postpone modernization because replacing a stable critical system creates more operational risk than continuing to use it. A development team may accept a temporary architectural compromise to deliver an urgent capability.

The important distinction is whether the debt is known, understood, and governed.

The Green Cargo case illustrates why simply attempting to replace legacy systems in one large transformation can fail. The research instead recommends understanding the origins and extent of technical debt, connecting it to business priorities, and gradually reducing legacy dependencies rather than assuming that a single “big bang” replacement will solve the problem.

Their managerial recommendations also emphasize prioritizing debt according to the capabilities it constrains and creating closer collaboration between IT and business functions.

For cybersecurity, the same principle applies.

A CISO does not need a technical-debt-free organization.

The CISO needs visibility into the debt that materially changes risk.

From Inherited Debt to Deliberate Risk

Technical debt becomes dangerous when nobody is explicitly deciding to keep it.

An unsupported component remains because migration is complicated. A workaround survives because replacing it has never reached the top of the roadmap. A fragile application continues running because the people who understand it are focused elsewhere.

The organization may technically know about every individual issue while still failing to see the accumulated exposure.

CISOs can change that by connecting technical debt to the same questions used for other forms of cyber risk.

• What business process depends on the system?
• What security capability is constrained by the debt?
• What happens if remediation is required urgently?
• How difficult would it be to patch, isolate, replace, or recover the component?
• Which dependencies make a seemingly local problem larger?
• And what is the organization consciously accepting by postponing action again?

The answer may still be to defer the work, but then it becomes a risk decision rather than an invisible inheritance from an earlier technical decision.

Conclusion: The Debt Eventually Comes Due 

Technical debt is created gradually.

A temporary solution stays in production. A legacy system remains because replacement is difficult. Complex dependencies make the next change more expensive. Maintenance consumes resources that could otherwise improve the environment.

Eventually, the organization is no longer dealing with one old decision. It is dealing with the accumulated consequences of many of them.

Recent research gives CISOs good reason to treat that accumulation seriously. Technical debt can constrain modernization and organizational agility, while empirical evidence also links technical-debt indicators with software vulnerabilities.
The goal is therefore not to eliminate every shortcut or replace every legacy system.

It is to know where the debt is, understand what security options it limits, and decide which debt the organization can continue carrying.

Because once technical debt begins limiting the ability to secure the environment, it is no longer just an IT backlog.

It is cyber risk.

For Further Reading

This blog post is based on insights and analysis from:

• Asatiani, Aleksandre, et al. “Technical debt is killing digital transformation, but there is a way out.” California Management Review 68.1 (2025): 55-75. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256251370795  

• Halepmollasi, Rusen Akkus, and Ayse Tosun. “Predicting Vulnerable Code Changes Using Technical Debt Indicators.” IEEE Access (2025).
  https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3602480