For AppSec teams, the ever-evolving threat landscape shows no signs of slowing down, and as new regulations emerge, such as the Secure Software Development Attestation from CISA and PCI DSS 4.0, securing software is becoming an executive-level initiative. With increased expectations and a prime position in the spotlight, AppSec teams need reliable tools that can act as a force multiplier for their AppSec programs.

Application security posture management (ASPM) can do just that by helping organizations gain visibility into their AppSec posture. ASPM enables teams to accurately prioritize and manage security signals from siloed tools—all while staying compliant with new regulations and keeping customers protected – by providing 1) a single pane of glass for AppSec alerts and 2) an automated workflow engine to take action on those application risks.

Let’s look at a couple of examples where ASPM can play a critical role in enterprise readiness and compliance in 2024.

What CISA’s Assurance Requirements Mean for the C-suite

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have published new requirements for CEOs or COOs to sign what they’re calling a Secure Software Development Attestation Form that confirms “the software in question is developed in conformity with the secure software development practices delineated within the form.” This includes how software is developed, its environments, its supply chain, and open source components, where it comes from, and how it's tested.

To do this at scale, organizations will need the right tools to streamline this visibility, prioritization, and measurement over time, which is where ASPM platforms come into play. For executives to sign off on their AppSec posture, they need to first be able to get visibility into their software development process and overall attack surface risk. Then, they’ll need a way to ensure that risk is being handled appropriately and consistently, and verify that there are policies in place that align to both internal requirements and external compliance standards. With that foundation, they can understand how effective these processes are at impacting organizational risk and feel confident attesting to their secure development processes.

With this approach, organizations can easily align to CISA’s requirements, ensuring that:

• Code is being created in a secure environment.
• There are proper checks during change management processes.
• There are sufficient policies and controls throughout the SDLC.
• Known vulnerabilities and emerging risks are addressed appropriately.

Although these stipulations apply only to organizations supplying the US government, the initiative feels very similar to the standardization of the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). Many companies—outside of those working directly with the US government—hurried to create SBOMs following the U.S. Executive Order on Cybersecurity, and we foresee this following a similar trend.

In tandem with the recent wave of executives being held accountable (e.g. the CISO of SolarWinds and CSO of Uber), we see this as a potential catalyst for application and software supply chain security becoming more of a board-level priority.

Complying with PCI DSS 4.0

Nearly 20 years after its first release, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is still a driving force in shaping secure software development and delivery requirements for organizations that process, store, transmit, or impact the security of cardholder data.

The latest update, PCI DSS 4.0, introduces 64 new stipulations and major changes from PCI DSS 3.2.1, shifting towards everyday compliance rather than yearly checks and emphasizing the need for continuous, programmatic, and proactive application security more than ever before. To meet these requirements, ASPM helps teams streamline risk detection, prioritization, and remediation, while also delivering more efficient ways to operationalize and maintain their AppSec program.

With ASPM, AppSec teams can rapidly ensure:

• Policies and workflows match to the established formal and defined roles, responsibilities, and processes for detecting, prioritizing, remediating, and preventing security flaws in their software.
• Broad and deep vulnerability detection and security coverage is in place across their entire application attack surface, including APIs when using a deep and open ASPM platform.
• A continuous inventory of bespoke and custom software, and third-party software components is maintained and readily available.
• Consistent, formal, objective processes are in place for addressing security issues, particularly critical and high-severity vulnerabilities, and can be repeated, operationalized, and proven to mitigate risk.
• Detection and management of “significant” changes to systems.
• Secrets security detection, remediation, and management processes are in place.
• Vulnerability management processes are integrated outside of just AppSec, including network and broader systems.

The Importance of ASPM

AppSec teams are being held to a higher standard than ever before. Increasing government compliance and regulatory guidelines, coupled with the growing shift for executives to assume personal accountability for security measures, are trends that will only continue to grow – Apiiro can help.

Apiiro’s ASPM helps AppSec teams do more with less by combining an open platform approach with native application security testing and software supply chain security solutions, seamlessly unifying AppSec risk visibility, assessment, prioritization, and remediation. By connecting across the development lifecycle (SCM,CI/CD pipelines, K8 clusters, etc), and aggregating findings from security tools (SCA, SAST, DAST, CSPM, etc.), Apiiro automatically maintains a comprehensive inventory that encompasses both bespoke and custom software.

This rich, continuous inventory and code-to-runtime context makes it possible to accurately prioritize risk based on likelihood and business impact, as well as flag any significant changes to ensure risk is handled consistently. By layering industry risk standards such as CVSS scores, CISA KEV, EPSS, exploitability, CVE/CWE, etc., alongside code-to-runtime context including unique likelihood and impact, Apiiro swiftly identifies and distinguishes security issues that pose real risk to an organization.

With Apiiro, you can streamline remediation processes with policies and workflows, as well as seamlessly trigger essential processes like code reviews and penetration tests. Plus, we can also assign relevant developer training courses with Secure Code Warrior and provide a timeline to track and verify changes.

With an open and deep ASPM platform, AppSec teams can meet the evolving compliance standards with ease, infusing security into each step of the software development lifecycle.