BellSoft has released survey findings on container security, revealing that despite a decade of ecosystem maturity, core security practices and questions remain unresolved.
To better understand how companies are addressing these issues, BellSoft surveyed 427 developers. The results revealed insights into how developers select and build container images, which security practices they follow, the challenges they encounter and how current security practices fall short of helping developers achieve their stated goals. Following are the key findings from the survey:
Container security incidents are becoming more common
- Nearly one in four respondents (23%) reported having experienced a security incident. The problem isn’t detection, it’s the gap between disclosure and remediation. In this window, often weeks or months, organizations operate with known exposures.
The root causes range from strategy and tooling to human error
- 62% said human errors were the biggest contributor to container security mistakes.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Developers have a plan for solving the container security conundrum
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48% said pre-hardened, security-focused base images would be most helpful in ensuring container security. Hardened vendor-maintained images directly address the root causes of today’s container security challenges, reducing vulnerability exposure, operational strain, cloud costs and 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. “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”
