Today, we released the 11th volume of our annual State of Software Security (SOSS) report. This report, based on our scan results, always offers an abundance of insights and information about software vulnerabilities – what they are, what’s causing them, and how to address them most effectively. This year is no different. With last year’s SOSS Volume 10, we spent some time looking at how much things had changed in the decade spanning Volume 1 to Volume 10.

Cyberattackers and threat actors won’t take a break and wait for you to challenge them with your security efforts – you need a proactive application security (AppSec) program to get ahead of threats and remediate flaws quickly. It’s critical that you stand up an AppSec program covering all the bases, from which roles each team member will have to alignment on KPIs and goals, and even a detailed application inventory to stay on top of your code.

October is cybersecurity awareness month, and this year, the overarching theme is “Do Your Part. #BeCyberSmart.” When considering what “cybersmart” means in application security, we realized we unearthed some data this year that made us a little cybersmarter and could help other security professionals and developers increase their AppSec smarts as well. We’re sharing those data gems below.

Developers face a bevy of roadblocks in their race to meet tight deadlines, which means they often pull from risky open source libraries and prioritize security flaws on the fly. In a recent ESG survey report, Modern Application Development Security, we saw that 54% of organizations push vulnerable code just to meet critical deadlines, and while they plan for remediation on a later release, lingering flaws only add to risky security debt.

Most modern codebases are dependent on open source libraries. In fact, a recent research report sponsored by Veracode and conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that more than 96 percent of organizations use open source libraries in their codebase. But – shockingly – less than half of these organizations have invested in specific security controls to scan for open source vulnerabilities.

Veracode has been officially recognized by Gartner Peer Insights as a 2020 Customers’ Choice for Application Security Testing. The report includes Veracode’s aggregate score of 4.6 out of 5 stars out of 95 independent customer reviews (as of July 31, 2020), and of the reviewers, 92 percent said that they would recommend Veracode’s AST solutions. Veracode, the largest global provider of application security (AST) solutions.

Maximizing the value of your application security (AppSec) analytics not only provides a window into whether or not you’re meeting security requirements but also it helps you prove your ROI. That can be a challenge for a lot of organizations – when stakeholders are not close to the data, they may miss milestones like hitting goals for reducing security debt or even how much AppSec program has matured by data.

When investing in an application security (AppSec) program, you expect to see a return on your investment. But in order to recognize a return, your organization needs to determine what success looks like and find a way to measure and prove that the program is meeting your definition of success.