When you incorporate data from application security scanners into your exposure management platform, you can assess the threat from formerly isolated code flaws using a broader risk context, which illuminates hidden exposures that your security and development teams can eliminate together.
Securing the code that enterprise developers write, assemble, and deploy has been a perennial challenge for security teams. As a result, code containing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security weaknesses routinely gets released into many enterprises’ production systems and customer-facing applications.
This happens because application security data often lives in silos within code-scanning tools, which makes it difficult to correlate with the rest of the organization’s security issues in cloud workloads, on-prem assets, operational technology (OT) systems, identity platforms, and more.
When application security data exists in a vacuum, the findings can’t be properly and promptly assessed and prioritized. As a result, security teams can’t deliver patches and pull requests with the speed at which developers ship code. This disconnect is only getting wider, as developers use AI tools to further automate and accelerate the creation and release of code into their continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) software development pipelines.
The following stats illustrate how AI coding tools are making application security considerably harder for cyber teams:
So, how can security teams successfully secure their application development lifecycle? Is the term “application security” destined to become an oxymoron in the age of AI? Not by a long shot. In this blog, we explain how the key to securing your entire code-to-runtime lifecycle lies in incorporating the data from your application security tools (ASTs) into your exposure management platform.
By doing so, security teams gain full visibility into their application development pipeline and are able to see where it fits into their overall attack surface. They’re also able to assess code risks within a broader context that factors in isolated code issues and security issues present in the rest of the environment, such as cloud workloads, runtime systems, and identities.
Leveraging this unified view of the attack surface, security teams can detect toxic combinations of risk that create organizational exposure. This in turn empowers security teams to precisely and quickly prioritize what they need to fix right away, and drastically reduce the number of vulnerabilities in production code.
Here are the top 5 reasons you should integrate your application security program with your exposure management platform.
Picture this: A new zero-day vulnerability impacts a popular open-source library — think of the Log4Shell bug that unleashed a crisis for the millions of organizations with the ubiquitous Log4j Java-based logging utility in their environments. Your CISO calls for an all-hands on deck response, starting with an immediate, detailed assessment of all the assets that contain the vulnerable software.
This sounds like a daunting, if not outright impossible task, but it’s entirely feasible to fulfill if you have an exposure management platform with a continuously updated, unified inventory of all your software libraries, code repositories, code owners, and associated security issues in a single view. With this comprehensive inventory of your application security data, you can pinpoint where developers write and deploy code, who owns it, where the code is running, and its blast radius.
When you make application security part of your exposure management program, you get comprehensive and up-to-date visibility to quickly detect which assets are affected by a headline-grabbing zero-day vulnerability.
New agentic ASTs, such as Anthropic’s Claude Security and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber, will dramatically accelerate discovery of new code vulnerabilities, which will logically increase the number of security issues that potentially need to be remediated. The result is an already massive backlog of application security findings will become even more unmanageable, worsening the security team’s alert fatigue.
Here again, an exposure management platform that’s natively integrated with agentic ASTs puts these AI tools’ scanning data in the broader context of your entire attack surface. When you don’t address application security in isolation, you can more quickly, precisely and easily deduplicate code-security findings, investigate issues, analyze and assess risk, and orchestrate remediations and patches.
In short, the integration of agentic ASTs with an exposure management platform streamlines the prioritization of application security risks, and automates and accelerates their remediation.
Static application security testing (SAST) and software composition analysis (SCA) tools can identify hundreds or thousands of high-risk code vulnerabilities, but these tools often list them with bare-bones data that gives security teams minimal context about their risk to the organization.
Which vulnerable code is running in production? Which code lies in decommissioned microservices? Which code sits on an attack path leading to critical systems? Without these insights, you can’t decide which code security issues to fix first.
With an exposure management platform, you can assess the criticality of code vulnerabilities and misconfigurations within comprehensive context and prioritize remediation accordingly, taking into account elements such as:
That way, you can determine the different risk levels of the same unauthenticated remote-code execution flaw. For example, the risk is different if the impacted code sits in a QA environment that is completely isolated from the internet, versus if the impacted code resides in your customer authentication application programming interface (API).
Assessing code-security risk in this precise, granular manner makes all the difference in the often fraught relationship between developers and security pros. Instead of showing up with a laundry list of hundreds of code issues to fix, the security team can pinpoint a handful instead, explain to developers why those are truly critical, articulate their severity and business impact, and even provide pre-written pull requests to fix them.
CISOs need to understand how code vulnerabilities contribute to the organization’s overall risk posture, so that they can then hold business lines accountable to risk-based service-level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicator (KPI) metrics.
Once application security data gets integrated into the exposure management program, CISOs can:
Integrating application security data into an exposure management platform elevates code flaws from a discreet developer issue to a board-level risk metric. The integration empowers CISOs to elevate their board presentations and C-level conversations from, say, SQL injections, to organizational resilience, financial risk, industry benchmarking, operational exposure, and business-line accountability.
With these insights, the CISO can:
Application development teams get routinely bombarded with requests to patch and update their code to remediate vulnerabilities and other security issues. Without a single source of truth, developers can’t properly prioritize remediation workflows and security teams can’t easily track the status of bug fixes.
With exposure management, security teams can effectively orchestrate and automate a unified remediation process across all assets and their exposures, coordinating remediation tasks that support multiple asset owners, functions, and business units. Exposure management helps consolidate actions and streamline workflows, so that development teams don’t get bombarded with remediation tickets from multiple disconnected tools
This remediation orchestration ensures consistent and precise prioritization of remediations, verification of fixes, and report generation via a single exposure management platform.
The Tenable One Exposure Management Platform can ingest, analyze, and normalize static-code security data from ASTs, allowing you to manage application security risk from a centralized platform, along with the rest of your exposure data. Tenable One can ingest data from Snyk (Snyk Code, Snyk Open Source, Snyk Container, and Snyk Infrastructure as Code) via our native Tenable One Connector, and from your other ASTs via the Tenable One Open Connector. This also includes the ability to integrate Claude Security findings as well.
This new data source for Tenable One gives you complete, code-to-runtime visibility across your entire attack surface by integrating AST data into your overall exposure management program, where you can correlate it with security data from cloud workloads, OT environments, runtime systems, and more. You can analyze static code risks from code repositories and containers, ingest associated tags, identify owners, determine asset criticality, and calculate asset exposure.
If your ASTs function in silos, application security becomes a blind spot, and you lack the context to properly assess the real-world risk of a code vulnerability to your organization. With Tenable One, you can pinpoint the code vulnerabilities with the most critical exposure scores and prioritize their remediation accordingly.
Finally, Tenable One helps you measure, track, and communicate total exposure of code vulnerabilities in Exposure View. You can see how your source code impacts your organizational risk posture, define exposure targets, view performance over time, enforce remediation SLAs, and communicate status to executive teams.
See how AST findings are integrated into Tenable One
Learn more about Tenable One, the exposure management platform for the modern attack surface.
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