Financial Services Leader Uses Automation and Risk Scoring to Slash Vulnerabilities by 80%

The Growing Challenge of Open Source Vulnerability Overload

For financial services organizations operating under strict security and regulatory requirements, this dependency brings both opportunity and challenge. The fundamental issue wasn't just the volume of vulnerabilities. It’s the inability to distinguish between theoretical risk and actual threat. Traditional CVSS scoring measures technical severity, not exploitability. This creates situations where development teams spend valuable resources addressing vulnerabilities that pose minimal real-world risk while potentially missing threats with active exploitation in the wild.

The team recognized that solving this challenge required moving beyond industry-standard approaches to create a more intelligent, risk-focused vulnerability management system. The company leveraged the Custom Vulnerability Scoring features of Sonatype Lifecycle to integrate a threat intelligence-centric scoring system that prioritizes vulnerabilities based on real-world exploitability rather than theoretical severity metrics. Sonatype's APIs made it possible to automatically integrate threat scoring throughout the workflow, ensuring risk assessment happens without manual intervention or process disruption.

This approach moves beyond technical severity to focus on actual exploitability, considering factors such as whether exploits exist in the wild and whether vulnerabilities are associated with active internet breaches. Additionally, by combining custom scoring with Sonatype Lifecycle’s Call Flow Analysis capabilities, the organization can respond quickly to future critical vulnerabilities.

Key Results

Building a Collaborative Security Culture

The transformation extends beyond technical implementation to fundamental improvements in how security and development teams work together.

Application developers and Application Security teams now operate as trusted partners, anchored by constant feedback and collaboration. The elimination of noise from irrelevant vulnerabilities has reduced friction throughout the SDLC while enhancing visibility into genuine supply chain risks.

The Application Security team is empowered to provide more strategic advice, guiding developers toward lower-risk open source solutions when evaluating potential components. This proactive approach helps prevent vulnerabilities rather than just managing them after discovery.

With dramatically fewer false-positive alerts to investigate, development teams can refocus on selecting the highest-quality open source software while continuing to reduce technical debt across their applications.

Preparing for Tomorrow's Threats

The organization's strategic approach demonstrates how intelligent risk management creates resilience against both known and unknown future threats.

The integration of threat intelligence with Sonatype's platform capabilities ensures that when critical vulnerabilities emerge, whether they're as widespread as Log4Shell or highly targeted attacks, the organization can immediately identify which systems require urgent attention and which can be addressed through normal remediation cycles.