Over the past decade, application security has changed dramatically. Yet the biggest shift is not that software has suddenly become less secure. The real change is that discovering vulnerabilities has become much easier, while fixing and distributing those fixes has become significantly harder. For software vendors, the bottleneck is no longer finding security issues. It is maintaining secure software throughout the entire lifecycle of a product.
Not that long ago, finding vulnerabilities was largely a manual exercise. Internal penetration tests, customer security assessments and occasional code reviews uncovered issues that developers would then address before the next release. Today, vulnerability discovery is continuous and increasingly automated. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools such as SonarQube analyze every build for insecure coding patterns. Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) has become a standard part of many security programs, both internally and at customer sites. Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools continuously monitor third-party components for newly disclosed CVEs, while container images are automatically scanned before deployment. Modern software vendors also generate Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), VEX reports and detailed security reports to provide transparency to their customers.
These practices are no longer differentiators; they have become table stakes. What has changed over the past year is the speed and depth with which vulnerabilities can now be identified.
AI-driven penetration testing platforms are dramatically increasing the amount of testing that can be performed in a fraction of the time. Belgian cybersecurity company Aikido Security, which recently reached unicorn status, is just one example of this trend. At the same time, new generations of large language models are proving remarkably capable of security research. Models specifically optimized for vulnerability discovery, such as Claude Mythos, receive considerable attention, but in reality virtually every modern frontier LLM can assist security researchers in finding weaknesses, reviewing code and exploring attack paths.
As a result, the industry is experiencing two important trends.
The first is a sharp increase in vulnerabilities discovered in widely used open-source components. Frameworks and libraries such as Spring, Tomcat, Jackson, OpenSSL and many others are under far greater scrutiny than ever before. These components are continuously being analyzed by security researchers, automated scanners and AI-assisted tools. Consequently, new vulnerabilities are discovered at a much higher pace, requiring maintainers to release updates more frequently. Every software vendor depending on these components must then assess the impact, update dependencies and distribute patches to customers.
The second trend is that penetration tests are uncovering far more sophisticated attack scenarios. Traditionally, security reports listed relatively isolated findings such as SQL injection vulnerabilities, missing HTTP security headers or cross-site scripting issues. AI-assisted testing increasingly combines multiple low or medium severity findings into realistic attack chains. Individually, none of these issues may seem critical. Together, however, they can form a serious security vulnerability that would previously have gone unnoticed.
Ironically, this does not necessarily mean software quality is deteriorating. Instead, the inspection process has improved dramatically. Better tools simply reveal more weaknesses. Much like advances in medical imaging detect diseases that previously remained invisible, advances in application security expose vulnerabilities that older testing methods would never have identified. As inspection capabilities improve, the expected security baseline inevitably rises as well.
This creates an entirely new challenge for software vendors.
Finding a vulnerability is often no longer the difficult part. The real effort starts once a vulnerability has been identified. It must be analyzed, fixed, regression tested, documented, packaged and released. Customers must be informed and deployment instructions prepared. If multiple supported versions exist, that entire process may need to be repeated several times.
Many enterprise software vendors do not have the luxury of supporting only their latest release. Especially for on-premises deployments, customers often remain on older versions for years because upgrades require careful planning, validation and downtime. As long as these versions remain within their support lifecycle, customers rightly expect security fixes without having to perform a full platform upgrade.
This significantly complicates vulnerability management. A security issue discovered today may require separate patches for several supported product versions, each with its own codebase and dependency set. At the same time, many of the underlying open-source components themselves have relatively short support windows, sometimes only a year. Security fixes are therefore not always available for the versions currently embedded in older product releases. Vendors may be forced to upgrade to newer major versions of frameworks or application servers simply to obtain a security fix. Those upgrades can introduce breaking changes or compatibility issues, transforming what initially looked like a straightforward security patch into a much larger engineering project.
In that sense, technical debt has become security debt.
Older codebases are more difficult to maintain, harder to upgrade, increasingly expensive to test and far riskier to modify. Design decisions that once merely reduced development efficiency now directly affect an organization’s ability to respond to newly disclosed vulnerabilities. Maintaining a clean, modern architecture is no longer just about developer productivity; it has become an essential security capability.
Dependency management has undergone a similar transformation. Open-source software has enabled developers to build sophisticated applications at unprecedented speed. However, it also means that much of the software stack is maintained outside the vendor’s control. Customers do not distinguish between vulnerabilities in proprietary code and vulnerabilities originating from third-party libraries. They purchased a complete product and expect the vendor to ensure that every component within it remains secure. Whether the issue originates in Spring, Tomcat, Jackson or OpenSSL is largely irrelevant from the customer’s perspective.
One likely consequence of this evolution is an even stronger shift toward Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). From a security maintenance perspective, SaaS fundamentally simplifies release management. Because the vendor controls the production environment, security patches can be deployed immediately without waiting for customers to plan upgrades or install updates themselves. Instead of maintaining and patching multiple supported product versions in parallel, engineering teams can focus on securing a single, continuously evolving platform. This dramatically improves the ability to respond quickly to newly disclosed vulnerabilities. However, SaaS also comes with its own responsibilities. Unlike many on-premises applications that are protected behind customers' internal networks and security controls, SaaS platforms are directly exposed to the internet and face constant scrutiny from attackers. As a result, customers increasingly expect independent proof that these services are secure. Security certifications, regular penetration tests, compliance audits, transparent security reporting and mature secure development practices are no longer nice-to-have differentiators, they are becoming essential requirements for earning and maintaining customer trust. In many ways, SaaS does not reduce the importance of application security; it simply shifts the focus from managing software releases to continuously demonstrating operational security.
This is why security maintenance itself is becoming a competitive differentiator. Customers increasingly evaluate software vendors not only on functionality, performance and usability, but also on their ability to deliver timely security patches, provide transparent security reporting, support multiple product versions and demonstrate mature secure development practices. Regulations such as the European Cyber Resilience Act further reinforce these expectations by making continuous vulnerability management a business requirement rather than an optional best practice.
For software vendors, that is perhaps the biggest change of all. Success is no longer determined solely by how quickly new features are developed. Increasingly, it depends on how efficiently vulnerabilities can be assessed, fixed, tested and delivered across every supported product version. The future of enterprise software will not be defined by who finds the fewest vulnerabilities, but by who can respond to them most effectively. In today’s security landscape, shipping secure updates has become just as important as shipping new functionality.
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