Sylwia’s post — est. reading time: 11 minutes

Introduction

In the high-velocity world of DevSecOps, vulnerability scanning has become a foundational control. It identifies known weaknesses, helps prioritise remediation, and ticks compliance boxes. But in the evolving threat landscape, scanning alone is no longer enough. While it may detect Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), it often fails to identify actual exploitable paths—especially those born from configuration drift, logical errors, or interconnected weaknesses.

Vulnerability scanning creates the illusion of safety. When scans return clean, it can be tempting to assume systems are secure. But threat actors aren’t constrained by CVE databases or patch cycles—they exploit conditions, not just known bugs. Modern attacks increasingly rely on chaining low-risk missteps into serious breaches. A scanner might miss these because they aren’t individual vulnerabilities—they’re the product of how systems behave in real-world conditions.

When the Scanner Says “Safe,” But the System Isn’t

A national logistics company experienced this disconnect in painful detail. Their DevSecOps teams ran full vulnerability scans before releasing a new routing feature. All systems passed with flying colours. But weeks later, attackers discovered a logic flaw in how user roles were handled across microservices. By manipulating permissions, they were able to pivot across user accounts and access sensitive routing and shipment data.

No CVEs were involved. No patches were missed. The problem wasn’t a defect—it was a design oversight invisible to traditional scanners. The real issue? Security was treating detection as the destination, rather than the starting point of prevention.

Exploit Prevention: Thinking Beyond the Scan

An effective security posture must assume that scanning is incomplete. Attackers probe behaviours, not just code. They test edge cases, craft malicious inputs, and discover ways to string together weaknesses. Exploit prevention demands adversarial thinking, not just technical checks.

Key tactics to evolve beyond the scanner include:

1. Threat Modelling as a First-Class Activity

Rather than looking for pre-defined problems, threat modelling encourages teams to imagine how systems can be misused or subverted. By focusing on the intent and behaviour of potential attackers, organisations can identify risks early—before a single line of code is committed.

2. Penetration Testing with Real Objectives

Routine pen tests often tick a compliance box but fail to simulate real-world adversaries. By defining business-impacting goals—like unauthorised data access, privilege escalation, or downtime induction—penetration tests can reveal how systems behave under stress and deception.

3. Red Teaming for Continuous Discovery

Red teams are not auditors—they’re creative explorers. Embedding red team exercises into DevSecOps pipelines allows security teams to discover and address attack paths proactively. It also teaches engineering teams to anticipate how their creations might be exploited.

Adversarial Testing in DevSecOps Pipelines

DevSecOps thrives on speed. So how can organisations bake adversarial validation into fast-moving pipelines?

• Automated Threat Emulation: Simulate common attacker behaviours in staging environments and flag unexpected outcomes.
• Runtime Behaviour Monitoring: Detect unusual logic flows, permission escalations, or system misuse during normal operation.
• Canary Controls: Introduce decoy assets or traps that trigger alerts if touched—revealing probing activity inside systems.

These approaches move security upstream. Instead of reacting after exposure, organisations detect dangerous behaviours while systems are still under development or controlled release.

Shifting Mindsets: Security as Strategy, Not Just Hygiene

One of the hardest shifts for executives is reframing security from a technical hygiene issue to a strategic risk discipline. CEOs and CISOs should ask not just whether systems are patched—but whether they are hard to abuse.

This shift involves:

• Fostering collaboration between developers and red teamers.
• Encouraging “pre-mortems” where teams hypothesise how their systems could be compromised.
• Rewarding teams not just for fixing bugs, but for preventing entire classes of vulnerabilities through better architecture.

The end goal is not to eliminate every risk—that’s impossible. It’s to reduce the attacker's options, limit blast radius, and respond with speed and clarity.

From Enumeration to Exploration

Most vulnerability scanners operate on the principle of enumeration: identify and list known weaknesses. But effective security must go further. It must explore. It must consider what is possible, not just what is known.

That includes:

• Understanding user behaviour patterns and edge-case scenarios
• Tracking dependencies and trust relationships across systems
• Building scenarios where attack chains form, even if individual steps seem benign

Scanners rarely simulate these chains. Humans—and creative automation—must step in.

C-Suite Priorities: Build Muscle, Not Just Reports

For executive leaders, the message is clear: your risk isn’t defined by the number of open CVEs. It’s shaped by your organisation’s ability to anticipate abuse and adapt its defences.

Top priorities include:

• Funding offensive security programmes, not just defensive scanning
• Making exploit prevention part of release KPIs
• Building a culture where red teaming is welcomed, not resisted
• Supporting tooling and telemetry that provide context, not just alerts

Organisations that treat security as a human, strategic, and creative challenge—not just a technical checklist—outperform when it counts.

Final Thought: Assume You’re Already Being Tested

Attackers aren’t waiting for your vulnerability scan to finish. They’re already testing your systems—by hand, by bot, by inference. They’re looking for permission missteps, error messages, and service interactions that weren’t built with adversaries in mind.

The best way to defend is to test yourself first. Go beyond the scan. Think like an attacker. And build systems that are resilient not just in theory, but in practice.