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October 3, 2025
Software is the backbone of modern business, but it's also a major source of risk, with Mandiant's M-Trends 2025 report revealing that 33% of all breaches begin with a vulnerability exploit. For many developers and security teams, the constant pressure of finding and fixing vulnerabilities feels like a losing battle. Our 2025 Software Under Siege report confirms why: the average application faces 17 new vulnerabilities every month, while development teams can typically only remediate six in the same period. This growing backlog is made worse by traditional security tools that are often noisy, slow, and can't keep up with the rapid pace of development. The biggest pain point is knowing which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in your running application and which are just theoretical, buried deep in your codebase but never called. According to our research, the average production application has nearly 30 serious, exploitable vulnerabilities and is targeted by 81 confirmed, viable attacks each month that evade perimeter defenses. This "signal vs. noise" problem leads to wasted time and effort chasing down issues that pose no real threat, while the truly dangerous ones might be missed.
To effectively secure your applications, you need a solution that goes beyond the old-school methods. Let's take a look at the evolution of application security testing, from static and dynamic analysis to the more modern approach of interactive testing.
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), analyzes a running application from the outside, looking for vulnerabilities through its exposed interfaces. It interacts with the application to find vulnerabilities, much like a hacker would. While it's useful for discovering externally visible issues and confirming that security controls are effective, DAST relies on security experts to create and manage tests. This makes it challenging to integrate into rapid development cycles and difficult to scale.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) analyzes an application's source code or bytecode from the inside out. This approach helps developers find security flaws before the application is even run. While SAST can show where a potential vulnerability exists, it often generates a large number of false positives. This creates a significant burden on development teams, as they have to manually sift through a long list of issues to find the ones that are truly exploitable.
IAST, or Interactive Application Security Testing, emerged to address the limitations of SAST and DAST by combining the strengths of both. It has since evolved into a solution that provides continuous security across the entire SDLC. The core principle of modern IAST is to embed security within the application itself, providing real-time analysis and pinpoint accuracy on vulnerable lines of code, whether in development, QA, or production.
This approach provides a powerful, continuous feedback loop. Developers get instant, accurate findings on their local machines, QA teams can test under more realistic load conditions, and security teams get the ultimate ground truth from the production environment. This solves a critical problem where vulnerabilities are often missed because pre-production environments can never perfectly replicate the complex configurations, data, and integrations of the live application.
By instrumenting the application with an agent, IAST gains deep visibility into runtime data across all environments, including:
This level of insight allows IAST to pinpoint the exact lines of code that are vulnerable and actually exploitable, not just potentially vulnerable. This drastically reduces false positives, so developers can focus on the issues that matter most.
Choosing the right security tool is crucial. While traditional SAST and DAST tools still have a place, they can no longer keep up with modern agile and DevOps workflows. They only provide a "snapshot in time" and fail to address the fundamental problem of false positives and the inability to distinguish between theoretical and exploitable vulnerabilities.
Contrast provides a modern, integrated solution that transforms application security. It injects intelligent agents directly into your code at runtime through instrumentation, turning your applications into self-protecting entities. These agents are constantly monitoring for vulnerabilities and attacks, providing real-time, accurate telemetry throughout the application lifecycle. By working seamlessly with development and DevOps teams, Contrast helps you quickly find and fix the security issues that are truly a threat, transforming your software from a weak point into a strong one.
With the evolution of application security, Contrast has integrated AI and machine learning to make vulnerability remediation faster and more precise. The platform's AI Intelligent Remediation Guidance uses generative AI to provide developers with detailed, customized instructions on how to fix specific vulnerabilities, tailored to their application's frameworks and libraries. Building on this, Contrast AI SmartFix goes a step further by automatically generating a fix for a vulnerability and creating a pull request in the developer's workflow, closing the loop from detection to remediation with minimal effort. This agentic AI perceives the runtime environment to plan and execute optimal fixes and even validates them with test cases.
Additionally, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server acts as a bridge, allowing an organization to connect their preferred AI coding agents (like those in their IDE) with Contrast's rich, contextual vulnerability data. This empowers AI to not only identify problems but to also act intelligently on them, providing AI guidance and enabling an organization to leverage the power of their own large language models (LLMs) to enhance their AppSec program and accelerate remediation.
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Tony Bailey has been involved in cybersecurity for several years, beginning on the front lines in vulnerability response program management, working on application firewalls, threat detection and response solutions, and more recently application and API security, bot management and network traffic segmentation.
