Modern DevSecOps (development, security, operations) teams often have to contend with more cyberthreats than ever due to advancements in AI-assisted hacking. Additionally, the advent of “vibe coding” and AI as coding assistants has substantially increased the quantity of code a company produces without necessarily ensuring security is built in, thereby introducing even multiplying the number of vulnerabilities introduced. These developments have necessitated the services of automated security testing tools like those from XBOW and other offensive security platforms.
There are a variety of automated security testing tools currently available. Many of them differ in function and usefulness for a given development pipeline. As such, it’s worth understanding what some of these tools are, what they do, and what use cases they best serve.
What is Automated Security Testing?
DevSecOps has incorporated offensive security measures like application security and penetration testing (pentesting) as a means of proactively identifying system vulnerabilities for some time. Until recently, penetration testing was largely manual often slowing down operations and ignoring novel methods of cyberattack that use AI to constantly probe a system’s defenses.
Put simply, DevSecOps teams cannot always keep pace with these attacks without tools that automate processes like exploration and validation. Automated security testing addresses these needs by using AI-powered tools to carry out the more laborious tasks involved in pentesting and other forms of offensive security measures.
Not only do these tools largely eliminate the time spent waiting on manual validation cycles, they also identify edge cases and complex interactions that manual testers may overlook. Automated security testing tools still perform real exploitation on these weaknesses so as to ensure their findings are founded in actual practice, not pure theory.
Perhaps the most notable benefit of automated security testing is its scalability, a factor that is becoming increasingly important as release cycles shorten and operations expand, particularly for enterprises competing in crowded markets. While automated tools can usually keep pace with these heightening demands, DevSecOps teams who employ purely manual testing methods often have a harder time doing so without compromising safety or compliance.
What Automated Security Testing Tools Need to Accomplish
By definition, DevSecOps teams have to blend development, security, and operations into a single streamlined process that supports safe, fast-paced releases. As IBM states, “DevSecOps makes application and infrastructure security a shared responsibility of development, security and IT operations teams… It enables “software, safer, sooner’—the DevSecOps motto–by automating the delivery of secure software without slowing the software development cycle.”
Effectively addressing these needs requires that a DevSecOps team create solutions that meet a number of diverse criteria. For example, modern security measures should be automated within CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) workflows while still being consistent and repeatable across environments. Additionally, they must be fast enough not to block deployments while still smart enough to prioritize high-risk findings.
Although these requirements aren’t necessarily contradictory, fulfilling one objective can feel as if it must come at the cost of another–security measures that prioritize speed may feel as if they must sacrifice quality to do so, for instance.
At a small and fairly stable scale, meeting these needs through purely manual testing is feasible, if not time-consuming. As operations scale up, however, meeting those same needs to the same degree becomes increasingly challenging, and unless DevSecOps teams grow to accommodate the additional workload, sooner or later, some part of that workflow will break down. These parameters form the criteria by which automated security testing tools must be measured against to make their deployment worthwhile.
Necessary Features of Automated Security Testing Tools
While not all DevSecOps teams have precisely the same needs from their toolkits, those needs often overlap enough to make most effective automated security testing tools broadly useful. With that being said, what makes for a quality toolkit can be broken down into three categories: integration, discovery, and accessibility.
As an example, quality security tools should provide CI/CD integration with native hooks for open source tools like Jenkins and GitLab CI. They should also cover modern, containerized infrastructure through API and microservice scanning while also providing automated vulnerability discovery that can identify misconfigurations and open ports, among other weak points.
In terms of calling attention to potential vulnerabilities, automated security testing tools should be able to make real-time alerts and reports by feeding discovery results into issue trackers like Jira or Slack. Accessibility, meanwhile, should encompass features such as role-based access control and remediation guidance functions that provide dev-friendly results for further analysis and future implementation.
Automated security testing tools that effectively incorporate these features are typically well-equipped to scale with a business’s operations without hindering other processes, but it’s always worth doing some research and trying product demos when available to determine whether a given toolkit is a good fit for a specific team.
Benefits of Using the Right Pentesting and Security Tools
DevSecOps teams that find automated security testing tools well-suited to their workflows and DevOps toolchains are often able to embed security testing into every build and deployment stage, making it easier to prevent vulnerabilities from reaching production.
By automating many of the more tedious and laborious processes involved in offensive security testing, these tools may also help reduce developer fatigue while also catching issues earlier in the software development life cycle (SDLC), both benefits of which could help lower costs. Lastly, tools that feature automated reporting may make it easier for teams to prove compliance.
AI and other technologies under the same umbrella have seen rapid corporate adoption in recent years, and while this adoption has allowed for greater operational efficiency across many sectors, it has also left those sectors open to cybercriminals using many of those same tools. As such, DevSecOps teams will need to adapt and innovate with novel security measures like automated security testing tools to keep pace with industry growth and advancements in cyberattack technology.
Disclaimer: GeekWire newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content..
