WhiteHat Security, a wholly-owned, independent subsidiary of NTT Ltd. and a world leader in application security, today announced the launch of AppSec Stats Flash, a monthly podcast and statistics report aimed at providing a more accurate view of the current state of application security. Until now, WhiteHat Security and other leaders in the space have produced annual reports that provide historical context. However, with the rapidly evolving threat landscape, a more frequent analysis is required to empower relevant and actionable takeaways that DevOps and SecOps teams can deploy in real-time.

AppSec Stats Flash will provide consumers and security professionals the context and insight needed to dissect the monthly findings most relevant to their organization. In each episode, hosted by WhiteHat Security's Setu Kulkarni, VP, Corporate Strategy & Business Development, with analysis from Zach Jones, Senior Director of Detection Research, industry experts will join in on the discussion about how this information affects different markets and what can be done to improve the state of application security. In today's launch episode, WhiteHat Security is joined by Vishwas Manral, CEO and founder of NanoSec.

The January volume of WhiteHat Security's AppSec Stats Flash tracks AppSec metrics from 2020 and provides in-depth analysis for a few key statistics. This volume also signifies the importance of the Shared Responsibility Model for successful AppSec initiatives through a discussion with Manral.

Other January highlights include:

• The Window of Exposure for Manufacturing and Healthcare related applications deteriorated significantly, resulting in more applications remaining exploitable for longer durations of time. In contrast, Finance related applications saw a welcome improvement in the Window of Exposure data.
• Common vulnerability types continue to plague applications - the top five vulnerability classes from 2020 highlight that organizations need to double down on prioritizing common critical vulnerabilities to impact the overall security posture of applications.
  

WhiteHat Security's research found that 70 percent of manufacturing apps and 60 percent of healthcare apps had at least one critical exploitable vulnerability open throughout the year. Moreover, many of these critical exploitable vulnerabilities are common vulnerability classes. This presents an enormous risk to organizations.

"The thinking behind producing a monthly Stats flash is pretty simple. We feel that the threat landscape is evolving quite rapidly and we need a more frequent analysis of the state of application security. This monthly stats flash will help us reflect on that evolving threat landscape in a more contemporary manner. We have a handful of metrics that we track on an ongoing basis and in each episode, we will bring forward the most important metrics and our observations," says Kulkarni.

Jones adds, "Examining application statistics metrics monthly is going to help us track the evolving state of application security. At WhiteHat we have the world's largest & growing curated database of application vulnerabilities which allows us to get to the heart of the trends and provide the guidance the industry needs to improve the state of Application Security."