Page 256 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

From Theory to Day-to-Day AppSec

For development and security teams, the shift from severity-based prioritization to reachability-and-
exploitability-based prioritization is transformative.

It means fewer false positives cluttering up your backlog. It means less developer time spent chasing
vulnerabilities that can’t hurt you. And it means faster responses to the vulnerabilities that can.

Organizations that make this shift often report striking improvements. False positives can drop by 70%,
remediation times can improve by a third, and developer engagement with security can increase
dramatically because fixes feel purposeful instead of arbitrary.

One real-world example comes from Fintonic, a financial services platform. Before adopting reachability-
driven prioritization, their security team was buried under thousands of vulnerability alerts, most of them
irrelevant. After integrating SCA reachability analysis into their workflow, they reduced false positives by
70% and cut prioritization time by 90%. For them, the change wasn’t just about efficiency; it was about
regaining control over their security process.

Why This Matters for DevSecOps

In a DevSecOps environment, security can’t be a bottleneck. Code moves from commit to production in
hours, sometimes minutes. That pace leaves no room for multi-week patch cycles every time a scan runs.

SCA Reachability and exploitability analysis fit naturally into this model. Integrated into the CI/CD
pipeline, they can flag exploitable vulnerabilities as soon as they appear, often before the code is even
deployed. This keeps security work proactive instead of reactive.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 256
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