3 Reasons to Leverage AI for Enhanced Threat and Vulnerability Management

As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, you know there’s a growing need to ensure applications and software are protected from malicious actors. A holistic and intelligent approach to threat and vulnerability management is essential for ensuring security against modern cyber risk. By leveraging AI-powered tools, especially for tasks like remediating security flaws, you can manage and reduce risk quickly and effectively. Let’s explore why using AI to bolster and modernize your threat and vulnerability management strategies will pay off big time in the long run. 

Reason 1: To Stay Ahead of Rapidly Evolving Cybersecurity Threats 

Threat and vulnerability management helps businesses understand and respond to risk, but what about when the threat landscape is evolving so rapidly? When new threats emerge constantly, it’s challenging to take a preventative approach to potential attacks in applications, software, and networks. 

For example, one particularly concerning new trend is using AI algorithms to generate polymorphic malware. This type of malware mutates in real-time, making it incredibly difficult for antivirus software and other security tools to detect and prevent attacks. This could lead to an increasing number of successful hacks that leave victims vulnerable to devastating data breaches and financial losses.  

To stay ahead, you can leverage AI to automate tedious tasks, like suggesting fixes for security flaws in software. This proactive step will help to safeguard data against the ever-evolving threats posed by AI-powered cybercrime. We’ll discuss this further in the next main reason to leverage AI for enhanced threat and vulnerability management.

Reason 2: To Deliver More Secure Software at Speed 

One task that reduces the risk of cyber threats is the remediation of security flaws and vulnerabilities found by application security testing tools like Static Application Security Testing (SAST). Detecting security flaws and vulnerabilities is incredibly important, but what happens once they have been detected?  

These discoveries need to be addressed to ensure the delivery of secure software that measurably reduces the risk of cyber threats. Since the advent of application security testing, the task of remediating security flaws and vulnerabilities has been done manually. The good news is, AI is changing this. 

Modern threat and vulnerability management strategies leverage AI to automate remediation tasks. Flaws that would ordinarily take hours to fix and persist for months can now be fixed in minutes. Intelligent remediation solution, Veracode Fix, uses AI trained on a highly curated set of data to generate fixes developers can review and implement without writing any code. This accelerates secure software development and means flaws that would otherwise require hours of manual effort and persist for months can now be fixed in minutes, at scale, with less effort and cost. 

Reason 3: To Reduce Security Debt & Improve Threat and Vulnerability Management with Fewer Resources 

As we just discussed, developers are often tasked with spending time they don’t have fixing security flaws they don’t understand in code they didn’t write. Not only this, but due to the speed at which software is developed, flaws are also found and created faster than they can be manually fixed. For these reasons, most development teams cannot keep pace with burning down their mounting security debt.  

Security debt is a critical factor in your overall security posture and the health of your threat and vulnerability management strategies. Accumulating security debt creates more operational risk, requires more resources to address, and jeopardizes the ability to create – and protect – revenue and value.  

Like financial debt, it is a cost that can be deferred only so far before it causes strategic and/or financial crises including cybersecurity exploits, missed opportunities, failed compliance, lost revenue, inhibited innovation, inability to compete, risk to mergers and acquisitions, and more. 

Organizations leveraging AI to burn down security debt through intelligent remediation will achieve better security posture outcomes in less time with fewer resources. Improving the time and effort to fix flaws with the help of security-specialist AI means more flaws can be addressed for the same investment of developers’ time – and more resources are available for projects that create differentiation and value. 

Conclusion 

AI-powered cybercrime has become a grave reality that all organizations must be prepared to deal with. To resourcefully tackle the modern threat landscape, businesses must leverage AI-powered tools to manage potential vulnerabilities quickly and effectively. By incorporating intelligent remediation solutions into your threat and vulnerability management strategies, you can stay one step ahead of attackers and protect your applications and software against malicious actors.  

Click to read our new whitepaper now to learn more about how you can use AI for enhanced threat and vulnerability management.