Page 254 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

But in reality, SCA often produces the same result: a massive, intimidating list of vulnerabilities, with no
indication of which ones can be exploited in your environment. The list might be hundreds, even
thousands, of entries long. Developers get alert after alert, patch after patch, until they’re buried in noise.
And somewhere in that pile, there might be one or two vulnerabilities that could truly compromise your
system, but they’re lost in the flood.

This is the central problem in modern vulnerability management: not every vulnerability is created equal,
and most tools don’t help you tell the difference.

Why Does Traditional Vulnerability Scanning Fall Short?

Imagine you’re running a large e-commerce platform. You push out code every week, your dependency
tree is hundreds of packages deep, and your SCA tool just flagged 1,200 vulnerabilities.

Do you fix them all? You can’t; it would take weeks of developer time, and in the meantime, your roadmap
would grind to a halt. Do you fix only the “critical” ones? That sounds reasonable, until you realize that a
low-severity vulnerability in your payment processing code could be far more dangerous than a critical
vulnerability in a library you don’t even call.

This is where traditional approaches break down: they use severity as the main sorting mechanism. But
severity alone is a blunt instrument. It tells you how bad a vulnerability could be in the abstract, not
whether it can harm your application as it’s deployed today.
The missing piece is context. Without it, teams waste time patching code paths that can never be
exploited, while real threats linger in production. This leads to alert fatigue, developer frustration, and a
backlog of unaddressed issues.

The Missing Question: Can It Even Run?

This is where reachability analysis changes the game.

Instead of simply telling you that a vulnerability exists somewhere in your code or one of your
dependencies, SCA reachability analysis asks a much more practical question:

“Can this vulnerable code be reached during my application’s runtime execution?”

If the answer is “no,” the vulnerability is still worth tracking, after all, future code changes might introduce
a path to it, but it doesn’t demand immediate attention. If the answer is “yes,” then you know it’s exploitable
in your current setup, and it moves to the top of your list.

By adding this one layer of insight, you transform vulnerability management from a reactionary “patch
everything” scramble into a focused, strategic process.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 254
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