Research analyzing 4,700 leading websites reveals that 64% of third-party applications now access sensitive data without business justification, up from 51% in 2024.
- Government sector malicious activity spiked from 2% to 12.9%, while 1 in 7 Education sites show active compromise.
- Specific offenders: Google Tag Manager (8% of violations), Shopify (5%), Facebook Pixel (4%).
TL;DR
A critical disconnect emerges in the 2026 research: While 81% of security leaders call web attacks a top priority, only 39% have deployed solutions to stop the bleeding.
Last year’s research found 51% unjustified access. This year it’s 64% — and accelerating into public infrastructure.
What is Web Exposure?
Gartner coined ‘Web Exposure Management’ to describe security risks from third-party applications: analytics, marketing pixels, CDNs, and payment tools. Each connection expands your attack surface; a single vendor compromise can trigger a massive data breach by injecting code to harvest credentials or skim payments.
This risk is fueled by a governance gap, where marketing or digital teams deploy apps without IT oversight. The result is chronic misconfiguration, where over-permissioned applications are granted access to sensitive data fields they don’t functionally need.
This research analyzes exactly what data these third-party apps touch and whether they have a legitimate business justification.
Methodology
Over 12 months (ending Nov. 2025), Reflectiz analyzed 4,700 leading websites using its proprietary Exposure Rating system. It analyzes the huge number of data points it gathers from scanning millions of websites by considering each risk factor in context, adds them together to create an overall level of risk, and expresses this as a simple grade, from A to F. Findings were supplemented by a survey of 120+ security leaders in the healthcare, finance, and retail sectors.
The Unjustified Access Crisis
The report highlights a growing governance gap termed “unjustified access”: instances where third-party tools are granted access to sensitive data without a demonstrable business need.
Access is flagged when a third-party script meets any of these criteria:
- Irrelevant Function: Reading data unnecessary for its task (e.g., a chatbot accessing payment fields).
- Zero-ROI Presence: Remaining active on high-risk pages despite 90+ days of zero data transmission.
- Shadow Deployment: Injection via Tag Managers without security oversight or “least privilege” scoping.
- Over-Permissioning: Utilizing “Full DOM Access” to scrape entire pages rather than restricted elements.
“Organizations are granting sensitive data access by default rather than exception.” This trend is most acute in Entertainment and Online Retail, where marketing pressures often override security reviews.
The study identifies specific tools driving this exposure:
- Google Tag Manager: Accounts for 8% of all unjustified sensitive data access.
- Shopify: 5% of unjustified access.
- Facebook Pixel: In 4% of analyzed deployments, the pixel was found to be over-permissioned, capturing sensitive input fields it did not require for functional tracking.
This governance gap isn’t theoretical. A recent survey of 120+ security decision-makers from healthcare, finance, and retail found that 24% of organizations rely solely on general security tools like WAF, leaving them vulnerable to the specific third-party risks this research identified. Another 34% are still evaluating dedicated solutions, meaning 58% of organizations lack proper defenses despite recognizing the threat.
Critical Infrastructure Under Siege
While the stats show massive spikes in Government and Education breaches, the cause is financial rather than technical.
- Government Sector: Malicious activity exploded from 2% to 12.9% .
- Education Sector: Signs of compromised sites quadrupled to 14.3% (1 in 7 sites)
- Insurance Sector: By contrast, this sector reduced malicious activity by 60%, dropping to just 1.3%.
Budget-constrained institutions are losing the supply chain battle. Private sectors with better governance budgets are stabilizing their environments.
Survey respondents confirmed this: 34% cited budget constraints as their primary obstacle, while 31% pointed to lack of dedicated solutions or processes. These are not technology problems — these are leadership and budget problems.”
Recommendations
- Continuous Web Monitoring: Implement real-time inventory and compliance checks for client-side scripts, particularly those injected by Tag Managers.
- Data Access Audits: Demand vendors specify exactly what data they touch and why.
- Least Privilege Enforcement: Actively restrict applications from accessing sensitive data beyond documented need.
- Secure Development Practices: Ensure IT reviews code deployments from marketing/digital teams to prevent over-permissioning.
- Web Exposure Management: Solutions monitor third-party and supply chain risks that general security tools are blind to.
“Client-side attacks are surging because it’s easier to go after the websites than to go after the infrastructure and applications,” adds the researcher. “The web is the weakest link and until organizations put proper solutions in place, this will remain the case.”
