You can’t plug every gap, but application vulnerability management is here to ensure you don’t miss anything that matters.
If application security sometimes feels like bringing a knife to a gunfight, it’s understandable: The average team monitors 129 applications, and over 118,000 alerts. When resources are tight, many organizations focus on the top 5% of issues, effectively hoping for the best that the other 95% won’t jeopardize operations further down the line. If that sounds like a risky strategy, it is:
- Organizations can’t identify security vulnerabilities early enough in their application development cycles;
- Manual triage processes impact release cycles, making security a bottleneck;
- Technical debt accumulates like compound interest as unresolved issues are passed along; and
- Overall security risk rises, posing a major risk to business operations.
The truth is, you can’t resolve everything — and you need a better way to address security risk through effective vulnerability management. That’s why prioritization and context have become crucial tools in the AppSec playbook. In a world where software vulnerabilities are a critical path leading to breaches, the ability to identify and focus on the most critical vulnerabilities specific to your organization is vital. Otherwise, AppSec and DevOps teams will be overwhelmed.
It’s time to reclaim control (and responsibility) over your application security.
What are application vulnerabilities & why are they a problem?
First things first: to protect your fortress, you have to understand what it’s made of and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. What flows through the gates, which types of attack are most likely to cause meaningful damage, where to place the most guards…or, as IT security teams call it: “Application vulnerability management.”
What are the application vulnerabilities and weak spots that defenders need to manage? These are flaws or weaknesses in code that threat actors can exploit to gain access to wider systems, disrupt organizations, or implant malicious code.
How do they get there?
Unresolved vulnerabilities linger in development environments
One significant driver of lingering vulnerabilities is today’s accelerated software development lifecycle, during which code reuse is practically synonymous with code development – 40-80% of code in new software projects comes from third parties, primarily from open-source components. That’s great for productivity, but not so good from a risk perspective: much of today’s software supply chain contains code that’s been around for many years and often contains known vulnerabilities that haven’t been patched. Web applications, in particular, are prone to the reintroduction of known vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, or security configuration errors. In fact, all three of the most prevalent software supply chain vulnerabilities have been problematic for years:
- Command injection (15.4% of applications)
- Sensitive data in log files (12.4% of applications)
- Cross-site scripting (XSS – 11.4% of applications)
Source: OSC&R in the Wild
These are the vulnerabilities we know about. The fact is, new vulnerabilities are discovered all the time, as evidenced by the ever-growing common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) list: As of November 2024, over 35,000 new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) were added to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) – a leading, but not the only, source of software vulnerability data. That sounds like a big number (and it is) but, the good news is:
a) Not all of these vulnerabilities are weaponized or being actively exploited.
b) Not all of these vulnerabilities impact your specific IT environment.
Here’s the thing: figuring out which threats are which is difficult. That’s why we have application vulnerability management tools that go beyond simply identifying vulnerabilities and help AppSec and DevOps teams harden their security posture without adding friction to the process.
What is application vulnerability management & why is it important?
There’s a saying in medicine, that “When you hear the sound of hooves, think horses, not zebras.” In other words: when you’re thinking about a potential diagnosis, consider the most likely possibility first. But sometimes there’s a zebra in there, with the potential to become a serious problem.
There’s a lesson in there for vulnerability management: with so many alerts coming in, it’s tempting for AppSec teams to focus priorities on the MITRE Top 25. But that’s not always the most effective vulnerability management approach – there’s a good chance you’ll miss the highly weaponized, less-known weakness that is relevant to your specific systems. And you’ll only find it after it has found you.
Source: OX ASPM Platform
Vulnerability management software and vulnerability scanners address software security threats by giving defenders the context and risk-based information they need to prioritize and triage the vulnerabilities that matter most to their operating environment. It’s a process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating weaknesses in software applications, throughout the software development lifecycle.
AppSec vulnerability management helps software developers manage vulnerabilities in the earliest stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), helping to reduce the attack surface while saving time and resources.
Organizations that adopt a risk-based vulnerability management approach can enhance their overall security posture by prioritizing mitigating according to the potential impact any exploited vulnerability could have on their systems.
Here’s how it works.
Application vulnerability management lifecycle phases
A vulnerability management process typically involves five steps:
- Discovery and inventory: Use tried and true asset management techniques to identify all applications – custom-built, open-source, third-party — creating a comprehensive inventory and giving full visibility into your environment. A software bill of materials (SBOM) drills further into the details of each application.
- Vulnerability assessment and scanning: Using tools such as static application security testing (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA), and dynamic application security testing (DAST), security teams detect and identify known vulnerabilities, security weaknesses, and potential vulnerabilities in code, along with their dependencies.
- Prioritization and risk analysis: This phase involves scoring or ranking vulnerabilities based on their severity, reachability, likelihood of exploitation, and projected business impact.
- Remediation, mitigation, validation: It’s time for patch management or other mitigations to address vulnerabilities. It takes ~ 55 days to remediate 50% of critical vulnerabilities once a patch is available; many organizations use automation to reduce risk of exploitation. The validation phase allows teams to cross-check that no new vulnerabilities are introduced during the remediation of known vulnerabilities.
- Monitoring and reporting: Continuous monitoring is a crucial aspect of ensuring that emerging threats and recurring issues are addressed. Reporting enables organizations to gain new insights and build resilience over time.
Now that you’ve got the tools, you have a process in place, let’s look at some of the payoffs that come from having a vulnerability management program in place.
Source: OX Security
The benefits of application vulnerability management solutions
Application vulnerability management drives multiple benefits across your business — more secure code and software development practices, for one. But the benefits extend far beyond the SDLC, including:
- Fewer security incidents and data breaches: Vulnerability scanning and management allow teams to adopt a proactive approach, addressing weaknesses before they become a problem while lowering the risk of introducing new vulnerabilities during the SDLC.
- Improved security posture: Application vulnerability management improves overall organizational security; continuous monitoring builds resilience and makes it increasingly difficult for threat actors to find an “in” to your systems.
- Enhanced visibility for risk-based strategy: Bringing together the insights gained from scanning, monitoring, and reporting gives defenders enhanced visibility into the ecosystem they’re protecting, with the information and context they need to project where the greatest impacts could be.
- Streamlined patch management: Effective application vulnerability management tools help streamline patch management and ensure timely and effective updates. Automated tools can take this a step further, reducing the manual effort to find and plug gaps, and allowing security teams to focus on more critical work.
The benefits of software vulnerability management are clear, but getting it right isn’t always smooth sailing.
The challenges of application vulnerability management
We’ve already mentioned that security teams are managing an average 129 applications, generating 100,000+ alerts. Eighty-five percent of CISOs believe that vulnerability noise and alert fatigue significantly hinder the processes for finding, responding to, and remediating vulnerabilities.
Teams monitoring multiple AppSec tools — such as AST, SCA, DAST, and IAST — can take a more holistic approach that integrates security into DevOps processes. The problem is that these tools are generally siloed, presenting disparate data sets, and often don’t “talk” to each other —literally the case with IAST, because it’s programming-language dependent, meaning some tools require a code change to work, or won’t work with your stack at all. That is not only cumbersome and time-intensive, but also errorarrow-prone, especially when being handled manually
In addition, many current vulnerability management tools lack sufficient context to manage growing software supply chain risk, leaving defenders staring down the barrel of a coverage and visibility gap compounded by alert fatigue and inadequate remediation capacity. In this scenario, there is a real risk of AppSec teams becoming bottlenecks in an accelerated SDLC.
How do AppSec teams get past the silos? There’s a new approach to vulnerability management: ASPM.
Introducing Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)
For AppSec teams, ASPM is an emergingam emerging approach. It involves removing historical silos between application and vulnerability scanning tools, providing more context, and giving AppSec practitioners the ability to prioritize, fix, and track issues throughout the SDLC. For example, AppSec teams can now not only identify software libraries used in their code, but also see code flaws, dependencies, and vulnerabilities. The ability to trace source code to all its sources — along with accompanying vulnerabilities — allows teams to move beyond simple identification and into holistic risk management.
With ASPM, AppSec and developer teams can evolve from simply finding CVEs to understanding and flagging libraries that are badly maintained/ have poor hygiene/are out of date. This adds the contextual component missing from siloed, traditional AppSec and DevOps processes.
Source: OX Security
OX Security’s ASPM revolution
OX Security is at the forefront of transforming application security. By leveraging the OSC&R framework and our AppSec Data Fabric, the OX Active Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform helps you break down silos, prioritize risks and automate remediation throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Our solutions are designed to either work out of the box through our proprietary scanning and/or integrate seamlessly with your existing tools, providing a unified view that aligns your AppSec, Product Security, and DevOps teams.
Find out why OX Security is recognized by Frost & Sullivan as a leader in ASPM.
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