Application security has reached a critical tipping point. Despite years of advances in detection tools, organizations are more overwhelmed—and less secure—than ever. The 2025 Application Security Benchmark Report from OX Security reveals a stark truth: 95–98% of AppSec alerts are irrelevant, and their flood of noise is actively harming security operations.
Security teams today are drowning in alerts generated by scanners, static analysis tools, and CVE databases. But instead of improving defenses, these tools often bury teams in useless data. As Chris Hughes of Resilient Cyber put it, “We masquerade as business enablers while we bury our peers in toil.”
The findings from OX’s study—spanning 101 million security results across 178 organizations—paint a troubling picture. Each organization, on average, faced over 569,000 security alerts, yet only 202 were truly critical.
That means security professionals spend most of their time chasing false threats, wasting budget, slowing development, and creating internal friction. This alert fatigue not only delays innovation but causes serious inefficiencies across DevSecOps pipelines.
Detection Overload and Context Collapse
A decade ago, security was simpler. In 2015, there were just 6,494 public CVEs. Back then, detection tools were celebrated for finding issues—regardless of whether those issues mattered.
Now, in 2025, the world has changed. Applications are cloud-native, development cycles have shortened, and attack surfaces have exploded. Over 40,000 new CVEs were published in the past year, pushing the global total beyond 200,000. But detection tools haven’t kept up. They’ve only increased the volume, flooding teams with unprioritized, context-free alerts.
OX Security’s report confirms what many AppSec professionals already know:
- 32% of alerts have a low likelihood of exploitation.
- 25% of alerts have no known public exploit.
- 25% of issues stem from development-only or unused dependencies.
This surge of irrelevant data clogs dashboards and delays real responses. And while most alerts can be ignored, the challenge is finding the critical 2–5% that need immediate action. These are often related to KEV vulnerabilities, secrets management failures, or misconfigured cloud posture.
The real danger? Teams waste valuable resources fixing issues that have no real-world impact—while actual threats remain unaddressed.
Evidence-Based Prioritization Is the Future
To escape this cycle of wasted effort, organizations must shift toward evidence-driven prioritization. This new model moves beyond simple detection, focusing instead on holistic threat assessment from design to runtime.
A modern prioritization framework includes several essential factors:
- Reachability: Is the vulnerable code active or dead?
- Exploitability: Are real-world conditions for an attack met?
- Business Impact: What’s at risk if the vulnerability is exploited?
- Cloud-to-Code Mapping: Where in the software development life cycle (SDLC) did the issue originate?
This strategy allows security teams to cut through the noise and zero in on what truly matters. It increases efficiency, fosters trust with developers, and strengthens overall risk posture.
OX Security is helping lead this transformation with a solution called Code Projection. This technology links runtime and cloud elements back to the original code, providing contextual visibility and enabling dynamic risk-based alert prioritization.
The results are striking. Instead of sorting through nearly 570,000 alerts, organizations using evidence-based prioritization can reduce their focus to just 11,836, of which only 202 are truly urgent.
Sector Insights and Organizational Impact
OX’s findings also highlight important industry-specific insights:
- Consistent Noise Levels: Whether enterprise or SMB, the background noise in alerts remains high.
- Enterprise Environments: Large companies face elevated risks due to more tools, larger app footprints, and greater incident volumes.
- Financial Institutions: Financial services are prime targets, with high alert volumes stemming from the value of the data they handle. As per the Verizon DBIR, 95% of attacks are financially motivated.
The implications are clear: If less than 5% of AppSec alerts are critical, then most security spend is misallocated. Bug bounty payouts, complex triage work, and late-stage vulnerability fixes all add to the cost. Even worse, these distractions fuel tension between developers and security teams, making collaboration harder.
The old model—“detect everything, fix everything”—has failed. The new model must be smarter.
With an estimated 50,000 new vulnerabilities expected in 2025, the current approach to application security is unsustainable. OX Security’s research shows that intelligent prioritization—not mass detection—is the path forward.
By focusing on what’s exploitable, impactful, and reachable, organizations can eliminate wasted effort, reduce costs, and improve both speed and security. As the threat landscape grows, AppSec strategies must evolve.
