Container security incidents are becoming more common, with nearly one in four respondents to a new survey from BellSoft saying they have experienced a security incident. The survey concluded that questions about security practices remain unresolved.
According to the survey by OpenJDK provider BellSoft, 62% of participating developers reported that human errors were the biggest contributors to container security mistakes.
Among the key findings in the report, BellSoft wrote, are:
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Developers ranked shells (54%) and package managers (39%) as the most essential tools inside the base container. Package managers present a particularly critical security concern, as they expand the attack surface both directly and by enabling runtime installation of additional unnecessary components. Combined with other non-essential tools, this creates substantial vulnerability exposure in production environments. A more practical approach is using hardened minimal runtime images, paired with fuller “debug builds” during development, allowing both security and diagnostics without compromise.
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55% reported using general-purpose Linux distributions (Ubuntu/Debian or Red Hat-based systems) with hundreds of packages their applications never use. Each represents potential vulnerabilities requiring security patches. When a vulnerability emerges, security teams must evaluate impact and coordinate across thousands of instances, regardless of whether the application uses the affected package.
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Trusted registries (45%) and vulnerability scanning (43%) were the most commonly employed security mechanisms. These represent basic approaches to container security, whereby organizations are constantly responding to newly discovered vulnerabilities rather than building foundations to minimize exposure.
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While 31% said they update container images with every release and 26% do so when critical vulnerabilities emerge, 33% update monthly, rarely or only a few times yearly, creating a substantial risk to applications and organizations.
Despite this, 48% of responding developers noted that a good solution could be the use of pre-hardened, security-focused base images, according to the. report, as these vendor-maintained images can reduce exposure to vulnerabilities, strain on operations, cloud costs and the risk of human errors.
“Across every section of the survey, one message repeats consistently: Teams want security, efficiency and simplicity but their current strategies and tooling makes this difficult to achieve,” said Alex Belokrylov, CEO at BellSoft, in a statement in the report. “By adopting hardened images, much of the ongoing security and maintenance responsibility shifts to the image vendor, reducing operational burden and total cost of ownership, while enabling more stable, low-maintenance, and highly secure container environments”
