Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

If an attacker compromised a dependency buried three levels deep in your build pipeline tonight, how long would it take you to find out? Open source libraries, third-party frameworks, transitive dependencies, build tooling, and now AI-generated code that developers may not have reviewed line by line: each of these components flows into your application, whether your team explicitly chose it or not. Each component is a potential entry point.

I signed the Free Fable letter at freefable.org. I want to explain why — and why the reasoning behind it matters for AI code security beyond any single AI model. Cybersecurity defenders are not just critics of technology. We are the builders and operators of the systems that keep real organizations running under pressure.

Security threats don’t announce themselves. They can slip in through vulnerabilities in your code, hide in third-party libraries, and exploit gaps that your team hasn’t had time to patch yet. That’s why application threat detection isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the foundation of a modern security program.

If you’re like our team, the morning after the Claude Mythos announcement brought more questions than answers. Among them: “Serious question. Do customers still need SAST?” It’s a fair question if you stop at the headline. Claude Mythos, Anthropic’s frontier AI model currently gated to vetted partners through Project Glasswing, had autonomously identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers . No rule books, no checklists.

Software risk has always existed. What’s changed is the scale, speed, and economics of it. For decades, organizations operated under a relatively stable set of assumptions: humans write code, security teams scan it, vulnerabilities get prioritized and patched. The process was slow, imperfect, and often underfunded — but it was manageable. AI has dismantled those assumptions. And if your security program is still calibrated to the old model, you’re already behind.

There’s a conversation happening in boardrooms, security operations centers, and developer standups that I find both thrilling and concerning: the conversation about AI-assisted development. Engineering teams are shipping features in hours that once took months. Products that would have required six-month roadmaps are being prototyped in a weekend.

Modern software is not written from scratch. It’s assembled. Developers pull from open-source repositories, import third-party libraries, accelerate development with AI coding assistants, and deploy across multi-stage CI/CD pipelines that span dozens of tools, services, and vendors.

Twenty years ago, the idea of continuously scanning software for vulnerabilities at scale was ambitious. Today, it’s essential. As Veracode marks its 20th anniversary, we’re not just looking back at what we’ve built; we’re looking forward at what the data tells us about where software security needs to go next. And the data says a lot.

The rules of software security have changed. For years, the dominant threat narrative centered on stolen credentials and compromised accounts. Today, attackers have shifted strategies — and the data proves it. According to the 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, exploitation of vulnerabilities now accounts for 31% of all initial access vectors, surpassing credential abuse, which has fallen to just 13%. Attackers aren’t just knocking on the front door anymore.

Every year, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report sets the tone for how the industry understands the threat landscape. And every year, the most important question isn’t what’s changed — it’s whether organizations are keeping up. Based on the 2026 Verizon DBIR, the honest answer is: not fast enough.