Zero-Day Readiness: How ASPM Can Help CISOs Respond Faster

Zero-day vulnerabilities are the new normal in cybersecurity. In 2023 alone, more than 100 high-profile zero-day incidents were reported. Despite the early warning signs, major corporations and government agencies, from giants like Google and Cisco to the U.S. Government, continue to be blindsided by zero-day threats into 2025.  

In December 2024, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department fell victim to an attack that exploited two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its third-party partner BeyondTrust, which the Department used for remote IT support.  

CISOs live with the constant pressure of preventing similar breaches, fully aware that if industry giants can be affected, so can their organizations. However, staying ahead of these attacks involves preventing zero-day vulnerabilities in the first place.  

The Growing Danger of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities 

Zero-day vulnerabilities can have devastating consequences, and often the most immediate repercussions are financial. Depending on the attack’s scale and depth, you may have to invest in emergency incident response and recovery and employ external services to contain the damage.  

Zero-day threats also impact operations, as system downtimes and disruption of core services directly affect the productivity of internal teams. The ripple effect can extend to your supply chain, compromising partnerships and magnifying losses.  

Additionally, breaches can lead to violations of industry regulations and subsequent fines. Application security posture management (ASPM) tools align with industry frameworks such as OWASP, NIST, and CIS, helping organizations achieve (and maintain) compliance.  

What Makes Zero-Day Vulnerabilities So Difficult to Protect Against? 

Zero-day vulnerabilities are particularly challenging to mitigate, even for the most advanced security teams. Here are three key factors that make identifying, prioritizing, and addressing zero-day threats uniquely difficult: 

Volume and Complexity of Threats 

Security teams often manage hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities across their software portfolios, making it difficult to address every issue. Prioritizing vulnerabilities and allocating resources is challenging, leading to time wasted on low-priority issues while urgent ones are neglected. Zero-day vulnerabilities are particularly elusive, often remaining undetected until actively exploited, lurking in the shadows while teams focus on other security gaps. 

Limited Context and Fragmented Visibility 

Systems are increasingly fragmented, and security data is often siloed across multiple tools, which limits the ability to see the entire attack surface. For example, an attacker might exploit an unpatched vulnerability in a third-party library that internal systems miss due to a lack of visibility into those external components.  

Rapid Exploitability and Patch Delays 

Zero-day vulnerabilities are particularly challenging because they’re discovered through exploitation, leaving little time for response before an attack occurs. Unlike known vulnerabilities, where patches are available, zero-day flaws require custom responses that may not be immediately ready. Additionally, organizations may face delays due to dependencies on third-party vendors to release updates or provide fixes.  

How ASPM Enables Proactive Zero-Day Threat Management 

ASPM is a security framework that aggregates and analyzes data from various security tools (code-level to runtime and supply chain monitoring) to improve the monitoring, detection and remediation of application security vulnerabilities. Specialized ASPM tools can automate most of these steps, offering:  

Comprehensive Threat Visibility 

ASPM eliminates the fragmented view created by isolated security tools. By centralizing data from tools like SAST, DAST, and SCA, ASPM provides a consolidated understanding of vulnerabilities throughout the software lifecycle.  

Beyond simply listing issues, an effective ASPM platform correlates them across codebases, dependencies, and runtime environments, revealing hidden risks such as vulnerabilities in third-party libraries or unsafe API interactions.  

This comprehensive view enables teams to identify if a zero-day vulnerability is in their software and can be exploited. For instance, ASPM can flag discrepancies between a code scanner’s results and runtime behaviors, offering deeper insights into potential exploitation paths. 

Data-Driven Risk Insights 

Effective zero-day threat management requires actionable intelligence tailored to specific environments. ASPM provides detailed risk insights like:  

• Impact Analysis: Tools assess how a vulnerability affects critical systems, clearly showing its potential damage. Contextual analysis reduces false positives, focusing efforts on genuine risks.
• Threat Modeling: ASPM uses predictive analytics to identify likely exploitation paths and suggest preemptive measures. 
• Visualized Risk Data: Features such as heatmaps transform raw data into clear visuals, allowing teams to prioritize remediation based on a vulnerability’s location, ownership, and severity. For instance, Veracode’s Application Risk Heatmap highlights applications that contribute the most significant risks and their origin and owner. 

Automation to Accelerate Processes  

Deeper risk insights are crucial to understanding your application security posture and directing your efforts effectively. However, you need to combine analytics with speed. Zero-day exploits are dangerous enough to trigger alarm bells across your security team and must be dealt with as soon as possible.  

ASPM tools offer the automation necessary to streamline:   

• Intelligent Threat Detection: Advanced AI-powered scanning algorithms detect vulnerabilities in source code, libraries, and external dependencies.  
• Risk Prioritization: Automated scoring mechanisms assess vulnerabilities’ exploitability and potential business impact so security teams can focus on high-risk vulnerabilities.
• Remediation Guidance: You can integrate ASPM platforms with other tools like AI-generated code fixes to get high-quality, reliable remediation guidance and reduce the resolution time to minutes. 

Veracode’s Risk Manager offers remediation actions focused on each vulnerability’s root cause, reducing your time to remediate risk by over 75%. This helps you minimize the window of vulnerability and better protect critical assets. Plus, its guidance is based on deep contextual analysis, helping ensure that your fixes are durable and effective.

Real-World Use Cases for ASPM in Zero-Day Readiness 

A comprehensive ASPM tool can revamp your entire approach to application security. As a security leader, it’s crucial to understand not just these tools’ components but the real-world benefits they can bring to your team and the wider business.  

Securing Cloud-Native Applications 

Modern cloud-native architectures, leveraging microservices, containers, and serverless functions, create a dynamic and decentralized attack surface. ASPM provides continuous, end-to-end visibility across cloud components, so your team can quickly identify and mitigate vulnerabilities, regardless of the complexity of your environment.  

Eliminating Operational Bottlenecks

You need various security tools to cover the entire SDLC and reduce runtime issues. However, these tools can create more problems than they solve without seamless integration. ASPM tools orchestrate your security solutions into a single source of truth, removing bottlenecks and breaking down siloes between development, security, and operations teams. 

Protecting Software Supply Chains

Third-party components are often the source of zero-day vulnerabilities. ASPM continuously monitors open-source libraries and third-party dependencies, alerting security teams to emerging threats. 

Becoming Zero-Day Ready with ASPM 

No security leader is ready to tackle a zero-day vulnerability at 9 a.m. Monday. Yet many leaders live with the unsettling certainty that—sooner or later—a cyber threat will strike. Avoidance may spare you the immediate cost and stress, but your team can only effectively tackle a cyber threat by being prepared.    

ASPM tools like Veracode do all the groundwork of integrating security tooling and providing a centralized environment for vulnerability management. Veracode’s Risk Manager, however, goes beyond typical ASPM capabilities to offer deep, contextual insight into every risk, identifying the root cause of every vulnerability and offering targeted remediation suggestions that can speed up your mitigation efforts. See it in action by requesting a demo.