Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), is an online community that produces free, publicly available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security. Open source components have become an integral part of software development. According to Mend’s Risk Report, 96.8% of developers rely on open source components.

Static application security testing (SAST) has matured from a gate-at-the-end to a developer-first discipline. Forrester’s Static Application Security Testing (SAST) 2025 landscape report highlights why: attack volume is rising, code is released at least monthly in one in four teams, and AI generated code is flooding pipelines with even more code to secure. The tools that succeed are those that shorten mean time to remediate (MTTR) while fitting the way modern teams build.

DAST is a security tool that attempts to penetrate an application from the outside by checking its exposed interfaces for vulnerabilities and flaws. Sometimes called a web application vulnerability scanner, it is a type of black-box security test. It looks for security vulnerabilities by simulating external attacks on an application while the application is running.

We’re excited to announce a powerful new integration between Mend.io and Microsoft Defender for Cloud (MDC)—a step forward in our mission to bring intelligent, actionable, and context-rich open source security directly into the cloud security workflow. As organizations embrace cloud-native architectures, security teams face the growing challenge of identifying and prioritizing the open source software risks that truly matter.

The increasing reliance on open-source software coupled with the accelerated pace of software development has created a growing need for support of deprecated packages. The significant majority of open-source software packages are not actively maintained, meaning vulnerabilities are not patched, thereby leaving systems open to attack. Malicious actors often target deprecated open-source packages for this very reason.

AI security threats are evolving at roughly the same speed that AI itself is: extremely fast. One of the most recent—and least understood—vulnerabilities involves vector and embedding weaknesses. These issues have gained attention with their addition to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and the risks are becoming more urgent as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) continues to dominate enterprise AI adoption.

As many of you may know, MITRE’s DHS contract to manage the CVE and CWE programs expired on April 16, 2025. While emergency funding has since been restored for a short time, the long-term future of these programs still remains uncertain. Understandably, this situation has raised concerns throughout the cybersecurity community about the stability and continuity of vulnerability tracking and management systems that many organizations have come to rely upon.

Security teams today face increasing pressure to quantify the effectiveness of their application security programs. Whether it’s justifying security investments to leadership or demonstrating compliance with regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR, teams struggle to showcase the real impact of their security efforts. Without clear, actionable data, proving that an AppSec program is actively reducing risk becomes a challenge. That changes today.

Every hype cycle brings fresh security concerns, and AI is no exception. AI governance might sound like uncharted territory, but it’s really just another evolution of the same security principles AppSec teams have been applying for years. The fundamentals—secure coding, risk management, compliance, and policy enforcement—haven’t changed.

Lately, it seems like the only thing anyone is talking about in the technology sector is Artificial Intelligence. With good reason! AI is an incredibly powerful tool that is only going to grow in usage and scope. However, there seems to be a lot of confusion around various terms involving AI and security. The focus of this blog will be breaking down the differences between securing AI, secure AI use, AI for security, and AI safety.