Software is the backbone of modern business, but it’s also a major source of risk, with Mandiant’s M-Trends 2025 report revealing that 33% of all breaches begin with a vulnerability exploit. For many developers and security teams, the constant pressure of finding and fixing vulnerabilities feels like a losing battle. Our 2025 Software Under Siege report confirms why: the average application faces 17 new vulnerabilities every month, while development teams can typically only remediate six in the same period. This growing backlog is made worse by traditional security tools that are often noisy, slow, and can’t keep up with the rapid pace of development. The biggest pain point is knowing which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in your running application and which are just theoretical, buried deep in your codebase but never called. According to our research, the average production application has nearly 30 serious, exploitable vulnerabilities and is targeted by 81 confirmed, viable attacks each month that evade perimeter defenses. This “signal vs. noise” problem leads to wasted time and effort chasing down issues that pose no real threat, while the truly dangerous ones might be missed.

To effectively secure your applications, you need a solution that goes beyond the old-school methods. Let’s take a look at the evolution of application security testing, from static and dynamic analysis to the more modern approach of interactive testing.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from AppSec Observer authored by Tony Bailey. Read the original post at: https://www.contrastsecurity.com/security-influencers/beyond-sast-dast-using-iast-to-pinpoint-exploitable-application-vulnerabilities