Solving Prioritization for Application Security

TL;DR Key Points:

• Security Prioritization Is an Expanding Challenge: Organizations struggle with prioritizing security findings and the volume of findings is growing. 2024 has seen a 30% rise in CVEs and AI-assisted coding will further exacerbate the overload.
• Operational Overload: 10% or less of vulnerabilities are fixed monthly, creating friction between security and product teams, leading to potential customer trust erosion.
• Need for Contextualized Findings: Effective security prioritization requires findings that are accurate, context-rich, and aligned with business and environmental factors.
• Environmental Context: Understanding how an attacker could exploit a resource, including accessibility, impact, and potential pivots, is crucial for prioritization.
• Business Context: Prioritization must account for the broader business impact, including service dependencies, user impact, and revenue risks.
• Threat Context: Assessing the likelihood of exploitation and the urgency of addressing vulnerabilities based on available exploits is essential.
• Actionable Guidance: Developers need detailed, clear instructions on how to remediate vulnerabilities, considering the broader impact on application services.
• Heeler's Solution: Heeler’s platform integrates business, environment, and threat contexts with remediation guidance, empowering better prioritization and decision-making.

The Problem

Security prioritization has become an overwhelming challenge for organizations, as they try to manage an ever-expanding application footprint alongside an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape. In 2024 alone, we've seen a 30% year-over-year increase in reported CVEs through July, according to the Qualys Threat Research Unit. The rise of AI-assisted coding—often trained on the same vulnerable code we're trying to defend against—likely exacerbates this issue even further.

The pressure continues to mount when operationalizing remediation. Consider findings from the Cyentia Institute that reveal most organizations manage to fix only about 10% of their vulnerabilities each month. The already overwhelming load of product development tasks compounds when you factor in the additional challenge of security prioritization. This combination of two seemingly insurmountable backlogs creates significant friction within the organization and can erode customer trust over time.

Trying to prioritize security issues alongside product priorities creates a challenging environment for application security teams. Not only do you need to spend time managing multiple securing products and triaging false positives, you need to contextualize the findings to determine which have a material impact to the environment and ultimately the business. You need to justify why these matter to an often apathetic product team, often providing guidance and impact analysis to give developers the confidence to implement the fix when they may lack understanding of the security or trust implications. All of this creates a mountain of manual effort that must be repeated again and again, overwhelming AppSec teams and disillusioning product teams.

What is Needed

Most organizations need additional context, not more findings. For effective triage and prioritization, organizations need security findings that are accurate and contextualized within their environment, business, and threat landscape. Prioritized findings need to be enriched with guidance that identifies the solution and also assesses the impact of the change on the application.

Environmental Context

Determining the environmental context of a security issue can be particularly challenging in cloud-based applications, where software-defined networks and identity access play a significant role. One crucial aspect is understanding the accessibility path—how an attacker could potentially reach the resource in question. This involves analyzing both direct and indirect routes, often across multiple hops.

Next, consider the impact on the resource. Is the issue severe enough to allow full compromise, granting total control or complete access to sensitive information? Or is it more limited, resulting in only partial compromise? If the resource interacts with critical APIs, it's essential to assess which APIs are affected and the downstream impact that could ensue.

Additionally, it's important to evaluate how an attacker could pivot from the compromised resource. Could they use a credential or secret to access more critical resources or databases? Could privilege escalation lead to further compromise of other resources or sensitive data?

Lastly, you need to have a logical understanding of the purpose behind the affected resource, that is the service. How does the compromise or degradation of this service impact related services and applications? An example is a Denial-of-Service (Dos) attack on the user authentication service which provides customer access to critical applications, when under attack customers will be unable to log into important business applications. Stepping back to take a broader view of the application is necessary to  consider whether any upstream or downstream services could be affected by a compromised resource.

Business Context

The first step in leveraging business context for prioritization is understanding which applications are impacted. This often requires deep environmental context to accurately evaluate how services interact and communicate with one another. Such insights help uncover complex dependencies that might lead to unforeseen impacts on critical applications. For instance, understanding the number of users affected or recognizing if a significant portion of revenue is at risk can reveal potential threats to customer trust that could have serious, lasting consequences.

What makes this even more challenging is that determining the material or irreversible impact on the business often spans multiple segments within an organization. It’s not just about development or security; it’s about understanding how a security issue could ripple across different departments, affecting everything from operations to customer experience. This comprehensive view is essential for making informed decisions that truly align with the business's strategic goals.

Threat Context

Threat context often takes center stage in many frameworks and while it's crucial, it's important to remember that threat context is just one piece of a prioritization strategy. The environment in which a threat operates and the potential business impact of an exploit that carry even greater weight. When there is a major business impact with environmental weaknesses, the threat is just a matter of time. In these cases, the convergence of threat, environmental weaknesses, and business risk should be your top priority.

Threat context involves assessing the likelihood that a vulnerability will be exploited, or worse, confirming if it’s already being actively targeted in the wild. This includes evaluating the difficulty of exploiting the vulnerability and whether there are known exploits readily available. The more accessible and widely used the exploit, the higher the urgency to address the issue.

Ultimately, while understanding the threat is essential, integrating this context with a broader view of environmental and business impacts will ensure that your prioritization efforts are not only effective but also aligned with your organization’s overall strategy.

Actionable Guidance

Effective prioritization is not just about identifying what needs to be fixed—it’s also about providing clear, actionable guidance on how to address those issues. To truly empower developers and ensure successful remediation, detailed instructions on how to fix or mitigate the identified vulnerabilities, along with an analysis of how these changes might impact the application are necessary.

Providing this level of guidance helps developers plan and feel more confident in implementing changes. They can see not only how their work will enhance the overall security posture but also understand the potential ripple effects on related services. For instance, consider a scenario where a penetration test reveals that an API lacks authentication. While this is a valid security concern, it’s crucial to recognize that other services may rely on that API remaining unauthenticated. Simply adding authentication without identifying and planning for these dependencies could inadvertently break critical services.

Guidance enables development teams to help plan and prioritize security findings. By offering comprehensive guidance, you ensure that remediation efforts are both effective and considerate of the broader application environment, ultimately leading to more resilient and secure systems.

How Heeler Helps

Heeler is a revolutionary application security platform that brings together business, environment, and threat context, combined with remediation guidance to aid in prioritization. Heeler’s unique prioritization framework drives actionable decisions using its rich context, ProductDNA.

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