Are You CODEfident?

We’ve been watching the global transition to an app-driven world for some time now, as companies develop and deploy innovative software at warp speed.

And we’ve also watched application security teams struggle to keep up.

Many try to use yesterday’s tools for today’s AppSec reality, while others wrestle with immature application security programs. And that’s when we realized: modern application security programs are different. They run on CODEfidence. 

Let me explain.

Security people these days have two big fears: 

1. They fear that they have a significant vulnerability that they don’t know about. Call it lack of visibility into their system, or inadequate situational awareness. But what it boils down to is that you can’t secure what you don’t know about. 
   
2. They also fear that the organization has not mitigated known risks. This is the mistake that Equifax made before they were compromised via a vulnerable Apache Struts library. They knew they had the vulnerability, but six months after the vulnerability announcement, it remained unfixed.

Those fears are generally driven by two factors: Outdated security solutions and organizational barriers that often unduly burden developers, leading to poor adoption rates and a lack of buy-in from development teams. The result: Organizations struggle to find and fix vulnerabilities. In fact, 80 percent of known vulnerabilities don’t get fixed by the time the app goes into production.

To drive those fears away, application security teams need CODEfidence—the knowledge that they can trust their systems to make AppSec work. CODEfident AppSec leaders know that can fix whatever comes their way. For Mend, this concept is so important that we have launched an entire campaign to spread the word.

CODEfidence defined

Just what do we mean by CODEfidence? A Codefident program has the tools and methods in place to quickly and easily respond to any future critical vulnerability announcement. You know that all of your company’s application security weaknesses have been discovered. Application security is deployed everywhere and used by every developer. So you have no unseen application risks, and your application attack surface is minimal.

To assess the current status of your program, start with a quick litmus test on Log4j, the vulnerability that caused untold stress to companies worldwide. How long did it take your company to find and fix all the instances in your enterprise? The longer it took, the less CODEfident your program is.

At Mend, we believe that a CODEfident program does the following things well: 

• You know what’s in your software. You know what languages it was programmed in and what open source code components are in each app. Every application has a software bill of materials, and your dependencies up to date. In fact, you have the knowledge to apply fixes without worrying about them breaking your build.

• You can prioritize and automate the process of fixing vulnerabilities. Your team has the tools to identify and prioritize the vulnerabilities that pose the biggest risk, and they also know what vulnerabilities can be safely ignored. You can automatically detect and remediate vulnerabilities in both open source and custom code–and you can also automatically prevent attacks when malicious open source packages are downloaded.

• Your developers are on board, not overboard. You can bring developers and applications on board in hours, not days. You’ve embedded AppSec tools into development workflows, making it easy for them to consistently scan code. Even better, you’ve given them tools that automate and streamline both detection and remediation, thus giving back precious time for development.

CODEfidence doesn’t just happen. It is the result of selecting and deploying a great set of application security tools—ones that scale easily, scan code quickly, provide accurate and relevant results to developers, and help developers remediate security issues. That’s what the Mend Application Security Platform does.

Can you be confident that your security and compliance are as thorough?

You can learn more about CODEfidence here.

Meet The Author

Adam Murray

Adam Murray is a content writer at Mend. He began his career in corporate communications and PR, in London and New York, before moving to Tel Aviv. He’s spent the last ten years working with tech companies like Amdocs, Gilat Satellite Systems, Allot Communications, and Sisense. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature. When he’s not spending time with his wife and son, he’s preoccupied with his beloved football team, Tottenham Hotspur.