Eyes on the prize: With automation taking care of the day-to-day threats, defenders can focus on more complex, relevant issues.
In 2024, businesses experienced a 180% increase in the exploitation of software vulnerabilities as the critical path to action to initiate a breach — almost triple 2023’s number.
High-profile software supply chain cyber attacks have put the spotlight on code. And increasingly, everything is code; what isn’t software is increasingly controlled by it. The (growing) problem is that companies not rooted in software development are increasingly building, developing, shipping, and integrating software into their network environments, often without the tooling and CI/CD integration necessary to make DevSecOps a reality. Amplify the issue with accelerated release cycles and an output that’s often going to the cloud, and it’s easy to understand why software vulnerability exploitation continues to be a key path to breaches.
Hands-on, resource-heavy
Every line of code has the potential to be a security vulnerability, and if your role involves ensuring that that doesn’t happen, you already know this.
AppSec teams tackle hundreds, sometimes thousands, of security issues across the software supply chain. Without automation, manually investigating each issue takes hours, and can make resolution a days-long process. When resources are tight, many organizations focus only on the top 5% of issues. That’s risky:
- Focus on the Top 5%, and you’re effectively crossing your fingers that the other 95% won’t jeopardize operations further down the line.
- You’re validating security too late in the development cycle.
- Security becomes a bottleneck, with manual triage processes impacting release cycles.
- Technical debt accumulates like compound interest as unresolved issues are passed along.
When AppSec teams automate vulnerability detection, analysis, triage, and response, they can manage more without overburdening staff. Automation can reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), preventing critical issues from making their way into production code, which helps to mitigate risks, streamlines release times, and allows teams to better manage technical debt.
Here are five ways automation helps AppSec teams prioritize security.
Five ways automation tools help prioritize security issues across the SDLC
1. Find the signal in the noise
On average, application security teams are monitoring 129 applications, with over 119,000 security alerts generated annually. Ox Security’s Katie Teitler-Santullo says the only way AppSec teams can cope with the volume is to use automation to correlate which alerts relate to the same core issue. “That level of contextual analysis reduces the volume of overall alerts by more than 97%,” she says.
2. Go risk-based for clarity
Large language models (LLMs) can not only identify vulnerabilities in code, but can be configured to generate alerts when any part of the codebase has a vulnerability that can be reached, exploited, or will cause a business impact. Focusing only on exploitable code significantly reduces the number of alerts generated, freeing up staff time to laser-focus on the 1% of alerts that actually pose a threat to the business.
3. Automate your AppSec playbooks
More mature security and development organizations have developed playbooks for triaging the hundreds of thousands of findings AppSec teams face each year. These companies may buy or build solutions that automate security testing and allow for customized, automated response — from simple alerting to patching to blocking a risk merge — effectively rendering manual AppSec triage obsolete. This approach drives reliability and provides immediate feedback, enabling proactive prevention of security issues.
4. Reduce friction with automated workflows
Traditional application security approaches often don’t detect vulnerabilities until late in the development cycle. Waiting until the last second can delay releases, which frustrates the development organization and leaves security teams scurrying to manually resolve accumulated issues.
Workflow automation takes the sting out of the process, streamlining communication around fixes, facilitating remediation and response processes, and reducing friction across the SDLC. The result: more secure, responsive, and efficient development, with faster version releases and greater productivity.
5. Eliminate cyber alert fatigue
Modern web applications are complex, with many interconnected components and dependencies — the likelihood of vulnerabilities slipping through the cracks is high. And if your AppSec team is wading through 100,000+ alerts, triage gets overwhelming pretty quickly.
SSCS tools like OX Active ASPM incorporate automation and analysis starting at the design stage of software development, helping development and AppSec teams understand everything in their CI/CD pipelines, from the entirety of the codebase to relationship and dependency mapping for third-party applications and infrastructure, through material code changes that happen throughout the application’s lifecycle.
Win-win: empowering developers and security teams
Reducing manual AppSec processes allows AppSec and development teams to focus on the most critical vulnerabilities, reducing security debt by up to 97% and cutting mean time to response (MTTR) from weeks to days. More secure software, more efficient development, more timely software releases: automation works for both sides of the AppSec-Dev equation.
OX Security’s Active ASPM platform empowers organizations to take a first step towards eliminating manual application security practices, while confidently enabling scalable and secure development. It streamlines application security practices, mitigating risks across the software supply chain by providing end-to-end visibility, contextualized prioritization, and automated response and remediation.
Learn more about how OX automates your application security posture management.