Fixing the vulnerability that wasn’t: Cutting false positives before they hit dev

Security teams don’t always see it as a crisis. After all, they’re doing their jobs: scanning applications, identifying potential risks, and passing findings along to developers to resolve. But ask the average engineering team how they feel about those tickets and a different story emerges. Many of them have wasted hours (or days) chasing down vulnerabilities that turn out not to be real. Not exploitable. Not reachable. Not relevant.

And over time, those experiences add up. Developers start to question the value of AppSec. They begin to view security as overhead rather than an enabler. Tickets get deprioritized. Alerts get ignored. And in some cases, real vulnerabilities go unaddressed—not because the team is negligent, but because they’ve been burned before by a vulnerability that wasn’t.

The real cost of false positives isn’t just time—it’s trust.

The root of the noise problem

False positives aren’t merely a tooling problem. They’re a consequence of how we’ve historically approached application security: scan everything, flag everything, and let humans sort it out. Static tools, in particular, are prone to this. They’re great for finding issues in code patterns but lack the context of runtime behavior. They often can’t tell if a piece of vulnerable code is actually reachable from user input, or if the output can really be influenced by an attacker.

The result is a flood of findings, many technically accurate in theory but irrelevant in practice. And it’s left to AppSec teams or—worse—developers to sift through it all and figure out what’s real. This simply doesn’t scale in fast-moving, agile environments.

More importantly, it trains developers to mistrust security reports. If even a small handful of findings turn out to be dead ends, teams become skeptical of every security ticket. They learn to deprioritize, delay, or ignore. And once that trust is broken, regaining it is incredibly difficult.

Why AppSec must shift from volume to validation

It’s time for a reset. If the goal of application security is to reduce real-world risk, then our processes need to reflect that. That means focusing not just on detection, but on validation. We need to be able to say confidently: “This vulnerability is real, it’s exploitable, and it poses a meaningful risk to the business.”

That level of confidence transforms how security is received by engineering. Instead of a speculative report, it becomes actionable intelligence. Instead of a ticket that might be ignored, it’s a fix that gets prioritized.

But to get there, we need to reduce the noise at the source. We can’t afford to keep pushing raw, unverified findings to dev teams. We need to apply context, triage, and clarity before the alert ever hits a sprint backlog.

Where runtime testing helps quiet the noise

This is where dynamic testing plays a crucial role—often underappreciated but increasingly vital. Unlike static tools that look at code structure, dynamic application security testing (DAST) evaluates the application in its running state. It observes behavior. It attempts to simulate real-world attacks. And most importantly, it only flags issues that are actually exposed during execution.

In practical terms, that means if a DAST tool identifies a cross-site scripting (XSS) issue, it’s not because the code might be vulnerable—it’s because the vulnerability was actually triggered in the browser during testing. That kind of confirmation provides something static findings often can’t: proof.

This validation layer matters more than ever in modern pipelines. As DevSecOps accelerates and security becomes part of the software delivery cycle, tools that can produce signal, not just data, are essential. DAST becomes an important source of that signal—not replacing other tools, but filtering out the noise they can generate.

And here’s where the subtle but powerful shift happens: when security starts delivering only high-confidence, validated findings, developers begin to listen again. The trust that was eroded by false positives gets rebuilt. And that’s when velocity and security start to align instead of clash.

Trust is a KPI we rarely measure—but should

As CISOs, we often focus on metrics like vulnerability counts, remediation rates, or scan coverage. These are important, but they don’t capture one of the most critical factors in AppSec success: trust.

If your engineering teams trust the security data you give them because they know it’s accurate, relevant, and clearly tied to risk, they’ll respond. They’ll fix issues faster. They’ll collaborate more willingly. And over time, security becomes embedded in how they think and build.

But if trust is low because findings are noisy, inconsistent, or unverifiable, then even the best security program becomes a background process, ignored or sidestepped when deadlines loom.

That’s why cutting false positives isn’t just a technical exercise. It’s a strategic imperative. Every irrelevant finding avoided is a step toward stronger relationships, faster fixes, and fewer real vulnerabilities in production.

Getting ahead of the problem

The goal isn’t to eliminate every false positive—some level of noise will always exist. But we can do a much better job of catching that noise earlier, before it drains developer time and damages credibility.

This means building a validation layer into your pipeline. It means integrating tools that provide runtime context and exploitability insight. It means correlating findings across tools to identify overlap and reduce redundancy. And it means empowering your AppSec team to act as curators, not just messengers, letting them deliver fewer but higher-quality findings that developers can trust and act on.

The takeaway

In a world where developer cycles are short, resources are tight, and attack surfaces are growing, we don’t have the luxury of wasting time on vulnerabilities that aren’t. Every minute spent chasing a false positive is a minute not spent fixing something real.

Cutting false positives before they hit the dev team isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about credibility. It’s about restoring the relationship between security and engineering. And it’s about aligning our tools, our processes, and our priorities around the thing that matters most: reducing real risk.

Now that’s a vulnerability worth fixing.