88% increase in application library vulnerabilities over two years

More like 88% increase in “disclosed” vulnerabilities.

The title of the post makes it sound like the vulnerabilities were introduced and discovered in the last two years, but it is more likely that an increase in interest in web and software security during the last two years allowed people to discover more bugs than before. In other words, if I have a database with 100 vulnerabilities in 2016, then I update the database with 100 more vulnerabilities in 2018, that doesn’t mean that there was an increase in vulnerabilities between those two years, it just means that my vulnerability scanner got updated to track vulnerabilities that were already in the wild, but it was not aware of until the update.