Veracode’s annual State of Software Security report has revealed that researchers found 70 percent of applications available online contain at least one security flaw stemming from the use of an open-source library. This can arguably be attributed to a lack of awareness about where and how open source libraries are being used, creating security risks. Open-source libraries are free and centralized code repositories that provide a base for developers to create applications off of.

Veracode’s analysis examined over 350,000 external libraries in 85,000 applications, concluding that the use of open-source libraries in app development is extremely common. These libraries contain bugs that, just like code re-use, can affect hundreds of applications. The report states that the four main libraries representing the majority of these bugs are found in applications Swift, .NET, Go, and PHP.