Earlier this year, ProjectDiscovery won the RSAC Innovation Sandbox. In a year dominated by AI headlines, the market signaled something obvious but uncomfortable: first-generation vulnerability scanners are no longer enough. Security teams are drowning in noise. Tools from vendors like Qualys, Tenable, and Rapid7 were designed 20 years ago, for an internet with no cloud, static perimeters, and simpler networks. Those assumptions no longer hold, and security teams are left trying to force static-era tools onto a dynamic reality. Vulnerability management is where innovation is needed most.

Since RSAC, we’ve seen an increase in interest from teams eager to move on from their scanners. But their leaders have been asking us: “If we turn off our scanners, can you prove we’re not giving up coverage?” Unfortunately, that’s the wrong question.

If coverage were the problem, our adversaries wouldn’t be breaching us. Our scanners would have caught everything already. The reality is different. Only a small fraction (6%) of published CVEs are ever exploited in the wild, yet exploitation is getting faster (source). That means the job isn’t to see more. It’s to act on what matters, at the speed attackers move.

We don’t have a coverage problem. We have a detection problem.

First-generation scanners rely heavily on signatures and version math. That approach guesses from banners and package versions. It creates false positives and misses backported patches, which erodes trust and burns time. Even Tenable’s own plugin docs warn that version-based checks can lead to false detections because vendors backport fixes. Therein lies the core of the noise problem.

When your results are just based on guesses, “prioritization” is theater. You can’t meaningfully prioritize what you don’t trust. You can only prioritize once you have actionable results.

From guesswork to ground truth. What to measure instead: clarity, speed, and action

Clarity. ProjectDiscovery and Nuclei validate exploitability at runtime. We don’t guess. We validate, so when an alert fires, it’s exploitable and requires immediate action. That shift aligns with how modern programs work: focus on what is known or actively exploited, not every theoretical issue. CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog exists for this exact reason; it highlights what attackers are using in the wild. Pairing KEV intelligence with runtime validation gives teams a short, defensible list.

Speed. Exploitation windows are measured in hours. In Q1 2025, roughly a third of newly exploited CVEs saw weaponization within a day of disclosure. You cannot meet that bar with slow content updates or manual triage. Our global community of 10,000+ contributors creates detection templates within hours, and every template is reviewed, tested, and approved by the ProjectDiscovery team before deployment. The result: high-quality, trustworthy coverage at unmatched speed, with ProjectDiscovery Cloud auto-scanning your assets the moment those checks go live. That is how you keep up with modern adversaries.

Action. Security teams don’t need another feed. They need evidence that drives decisions. Runtime validation cuts false positives so responders can spend time fixing real exposure. Verizon’s 2025 DBIR shows exploitation of vulnerabilities as an initial access vector climbing, which means precision and response time directly change breach probability.

“But how do you compare to Tenable and Qualys on coverage?”

Here is the reframing we encourage buyers to use when shopping for VM:

Proof in practice: accuracy and speed at internet scale

Automation with Real-time Autoscan ProjectDiscovery automatically scans your internal and external attack surfaces the minute that a new detection template is written. Compared to 1 - 3 days from first-generation scanners like Tenable and Qualys, this speed gives you instant answers when time matters most. 

Powered by a global infosec community Our Nuclei template library now spans well over ten thousand templates and continues to grow every day, driven by thousands of researchers around the world who care about exploitability and evidence, not checkbox counts. That community is why we can move faster with more accuracy than first-generation scanners.

If you want to talk about a “coverage gap,” talk about the one that actually hurts

The biggest blind spot is not CVEs. It is non-CVE exposures like misconfigurations. NSA and CISA published a top-ten list of the misconfigurations they keep seeing in large environments. These are not edge cases. They are routine, they are exploitable, and many scanners don’t check for them. In contrast, Nuclei templates contain thousands of misconfiguration checks like default passwords, exposed panels, and leaked secrets. 

We recently examined the DeepSeek incident earlier this year where a researcher used Nuclei to find a misconfigured database that exposed over a million lines of sensitive logs, keys, and backend details. That kind of mistake is exactly why runtime detection and configuration awareness matter more than counting signatures.

A simple way to evaluate us

If your leadership is looking for assurance, consider a two-week head-to-head evaluation focused on real outcomes, not just catalog size.

Key Criteria to Measure:

When you evaluate on these four outcomes, you’ll see the difference: faster detection, fewer false positives, and stronger risk reduction, all without compromise.

The takeaway

Turning off noise is not turning off security. It is how you get clarity in what actually puts your business at risk, speed to respond before attackers do, and actionable signals that your teams can move on immediately.

That is what modern vulnerability management looks like. It is how you remove risk, not just count checks.