Beyond “Fast”: Why Deep, Continuous Risk Analysis is the Only Way Forward
False positives from security scanners cost one enterprise over 200 developer hours in a single quarter. At a loaded cost of $150/hour, that’s $30,000 in wasted productivity. Frustrated, they disabled their scanners entirely. Multiplied across dozens of teams, this problem costs enterprise organizations millions, and it is not an isolated issue. This impossible trade-off between noise and risk is why organizations need a more intelligent approach to security.
The core problem isn’t code security scanning itself; it’s the false dilemma between speed and accuracy. Many organizations feel caught between shipping new features quickly and ensuring their code is genuinely secure. This pressure has led to the adoption of “fast” code security tools that, while quick, are alarmingly superficial.
The False Positive Crisis: Developers Are Drowning in Noise
One of our enterprise customers revealed their development team disabled their previous security tools entirely after over 200 developer hours were wasted on false positives in a single quarter. This isn’t an isolated incident; it’s an industry-wide crisis costing businesses millions in wasted effort and, crucially, missed vulnerabilities. Academic research supports this, with two-thirds of papers on Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools flagging high false positive rates as a major impediment to use, leading to decreased trust and reduced productivity.
In one stark example, a banking customer challenged us when a competitor’s tool found hundreds more findings than Veracode. Our security research team investigated for 75 hours and found that every single one was a false positive. That’s developer time and resources burned for no security gain. At enterprise scale, these 75 hours translate to hundreds of hours of wasted developer time – easily $100,000+ in lost productivity on a single false positive investigation. The reality is simple: too many false positives lead developers to switch off their security tools, leaving their applications blind to real risks.
Veracode has built a reputation for having some of the lowest false positive rates on the market, averaging less than 1% compared to the industry norm of 5-30%. How do we achieve this? Through a sophisticated approach that goes far beyond simple pattern matching. We employ advanced techniques like reachability and “taint tracing” to ensure we only report flaws that an attacker can actually invoke and control.
We also perform full program analysis, understanding how data and control flow throughout the entire application, not just isolated snippets. Crucially, we offer extensive framework support for hundreds of modern web application frameworks, understanding their unique control flow logic to accurately identify vulnerabilities. In total, Veracode understands the actual control flow of 170+ frameworks across 11 languages. This context awareness is why our false positive rate is less than 1% while competitors range from 5-30%.
Our risk-sensitive context filtering further reduces noise by suppressing findings that have no security implications in a given context. This precision is continuously refined by a feedback loop from thousands of organizations, processing millions of scans and hundreds of trillions of lines of code.
The False Negative Danger: The Silent Killers
If too many false positives are bad, then simply optimizing for low false positives without considering detection rates is a recipe for disaster. Missing a critical finding can lead to devastating financial and reputational costs. As one automotive security practitioner put it, regarding false negatives: “that one is going to kill you.” While fast scanners deliver quick results, they cut corners, missing complex, sophisticated attacks that deep analysis can uncover. These “crown jewel” applications, often large and monolithic, demand thorough analysis, even if it takes longer.
The dirty secret of ‘fast’ scanners: they’re only fast because they skip the hard work. When Snyk, Checkmarx, or GitHub Advanced Security tout sub-minute scan times, ask them: “Are you doing full program analysis? Do you understand my framework’s control flow? Are you tracing every possible attack path?” The answer is no, which is why their false positive rates are 5-30x higher than ours.
“Shift Left” Needs a Rethink: Embracing “Fail Forward”
The industry has widely adopted “shifting left” – testing as early as possible – to fix bugs when they’re cheaper. But this economic argument falls apart with high false positive rates; it simply wastes developer time earlier. The real benefit of shifting left comes from accurate, actionable findings that don’t block pipelines or flood developers with noise.
We advocate for a “fail forward” approach: ensuring code changes can safely reach production quickly, rather than waiting for perfection. This means continuous background scanning on every code change, making results visible to both development and security teams, but only failing the pipeline in extreme, high-risk cases.
For example, a healthcare customer discovered a critical authentication bypass in a massive monolithic application on a Friday afternoon. Under their previous gate-based Code Security approach, the security scan alone would have added 3+ hours to their emergency deployment. By implementing fail-forward principles with continuous background scanning, they deployed the fix in 47 minutes and avoided a potential weekend-long exposure window.
For enterprises fixing 500 critical findings annually, at 4 hours saved per fix, that’s $2M+ in avoided exposure risk based on $10M hourly revenue risk during outages.
The Solution: Continuous Repository Scanning
The clock is ticking. Every day without continuous scanning means developers disabling tools, hiding critical vulnerabilities, and security debt compounding. The good news? You can start transforming your security posture in minutes.
Instead of custom pipeline development for every repository, Veracode offers centralized workflows that automate security testing across your entire SCM environment (GitHub, Azure DevOps, GitLab). We optimized for accuracy first, then solved the speed problem through architecture – continuous background scanning that never blocks deployments. This isn’t a compromise; it’s a fundamentally better approach that gives you both depth and speed.
This approach offers enterprise-grade security without the headaches: low false positives and false negatives, early testing, support for “fail forward” and merge gates, and clear issue visibility for both development and security teams.
This accuracy-first approach extends beyond SAST. The same continuous scanning architecture handles Software Composition Analysis (SCA) for open-source risks, Container Security, and Infrastructure as Code scanning – all with the same sub-1% false positive rate that makes our SAST trusted by thousands of teams.
Ready to transform your application security?
Download our ebook, The Hidden Cost of Surface-Level Scanning: How Deep Risk Analysis Beats Fast Scanning, to learn more about:
- Why teams waste $120K annually per team on false positives
- How to achieve 85% faster fixes without blocking deployments
- The documented $2M+ ROI from eliminating exposure windows
- Practical strategies for implementing “fail forward” security
No pipeline changes. No broken builds. Just better security.
This blog was co-authored by Tim Jarrett, VP Product Mgmt.
