For over a decade, shifting left has been the north star of application security strategies. The idea was simple: the earlier in the development lifecycle you can find vulnerabilities, the cheaper and easier they are to fix. This spurred the rise of static application security testing (SAST) tools, code-level security linters, and DevSecOps processes designed to help developers catch and fix security flaws before they reach production.
But AppSec has changed. With cloud-native architectures, microservices, myriad open-source dependencies, and the relentless pace of AI-boosted development cycles, static scans can’t keep up. Shifting left no longer guarantees security in production—and the alarm bells are ringing.
SAST gets noisy and is plagued by false positives
SAST tools analyze source code for known patterns of insecure logic but lack any runtime context, which leads to false positives. In fact, industry experts agree that most static analysis findings don’t need any developer action at all. And yet all those alerts need to be checked, which slows down development and erodes trust in security tools and application security itself.
As codebases become more complex and abstracted from actual first-party code through APIs, third-party packages, and transpilation, the gap between static analysis and real exploitability widens. This is true not only for SAST but also static software composition analysis (SCA) tools that routinely generate lots of non-actionable warnings. The net result? Developers are suffering from alert fatigue and often sidestep or completely ignore security warnings, potentially leaving real issues unresolved among the noise.
Developer sentiment is turning against shift left
Research shows developers are frustrated with the burden that shift-left AppSec places on them and feel disconnected from actual business or security risk. Many feel that shifting left has, quite literally, passed the application security buck to them alone—on top of the growing pressure to innovate, build, and release faster.
The 2023 GitLab DevSecOps report found that security is clearly taking a back seat for engineering teams:
- Only 53% of developers said they feel responsible for security, down from 70% just two years prior.
- 42% of developers said they bypass security to meet deadlines.
When security tools disrupt workflows, introduce noise, or generate delays and busywork, they will not win developer mindshare—and that undermines the shift-left philosophy entirely.
The vendor sprawl problem
It’s no overstatement to say that the AppSec vendor landscape has exploded. According to Momentum Cyber’s 2024 cybersecurity market review, there are over 1,200 companies offering various application security tools, spanning SAST, DAST, SCA, container scanning, API security, and more.
This proliferation of point solutions leads to tool sprawl in organizations when deployed, inducing tool fatigue and integration chaos. Organizations often end up with:
- Overlapping tools that duplicate data and effort
- Inconsistent findings across platforms
- Difficulty scaling or centralizing risk views
Engineering leaders and CISOs alike are now looking for security products that consolidate capabilities and provide context-aware prioritization. What they emphatically do not need is yet another point solution that adds to the noise in the name of shifting left.
Instead of throwing more chaos into the mix, the Invicti platform provides a consolidated, runtime-focused view of your overall security posture by combining native DAST, API security, dynamic SCA, and posture management features with a plethora of integrations to give you top-down visibility into real, actionable security gaps.
The DAST-first revolution: Confirmed exploitability, prioritized remediation
Dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools have matured greatly over the past decade. Unlike SAST, which lives and breathes source code, DAST observes actual HTTP traffic and execution behavior in running applications. When reported with the level of accuracy and confidence made possible by modern proof-based validation, DAST findings clearly show what to fix and what to prioritize—without the noise of redundant static alerts.
Built around the industry’s best DAST scanning engine, Invicti’s pioneering DAST-first application security platform integrates with CI/CD pipelines, supports API discovery, scanning, and management, and can auto-prioritize vulnerabilities based on runtime behavior and asset value. It even comes with ML-powered Predictive Risk Scoring to indicate which of your assets are most likely to be vulnerable and should be scanned first.
Compared to the noisy and fragmented world of SAST-heavy shift-left, Invicti’s DAST-first AppSec platform brings refreshing benefits:
- No false positives for exploitable vulnerabilities: The Invicti scan engine uses proof-based scanning to automatically verify and prove exploitability for many common vulnerabilities. And if something is exploitable, it’s not a false positive and you know it needs fixing.
- Language-agnostic testing: Unlike SAST, DAST is inherently tech-agnostic, so you don’t need separate tools or custom tuning for different tech stacks. If it’s vulnerable in a running app, DAST can test it.
- Realistic testing that mimics attacker actions: If the running app can be exploited, attackers won’t care that all your SAST scans passed. By probing your applications and APIs at runtime, DAST gives you an attacker’s eye view of your environment.
Attackers don’t shift left—they live in your runtime
The most critical shift in the application security paradigm isn’t left or right but downstream into the runtime. Vulnerabilities that result in real-life data breaches are often invisible at the code level and only emerge through misuse, misconfiguration, or interactions between components in production environments. That’s because attackers work dynamically: probe your APIs, fuzz your inputs, abuse your business logic, and chain vulnerabilities to escalate access.
The 2025 Verizon DBIR leaves no doubt that runtime vulnerabilities are being successfully exploited by malicious actors, stating that, compared to their 2024 findings, “Exploitation of vulnerabilities as an initial access step for a data breach grew by 34%, now accounting for 20% of breaches.” This is in addition to the 180% growth they noted between the 2023 and 2024 editions. And those are only the vulnerabilities that are tracked for officially reported data breaches.
To defend against modern threats, security must operate continuously and contextually at runtime, not just at commit time. In a way, the growth of tool categories like application security posture management (ASPM) and runtime application self-protection (RASP) was driven directly by the realization that a clean SAST scan tells you nothing about your security posture once deployed in real-world conditions.
Conclusion: Shift smart, not left
The solution isn’t to abandon shift-left entirely but to evolve past it. Static analysis, while still important, no longer works as the foundation of a modern AppSec program. Taking a DAST-first approach lets security leaders:
- Invest in dynamic security testing and runtime observability
- Consolidate fragmented toolchains into platforms that prioritize real risk
- Free developers from alert fatigue with more relevant and actionable findings
- Keep up with attackers who live not in your source code but in your running apps
In 2025 and beyond, AppSec isn’t about shifting earlier—it’s about shifting smarter.
The post Friends don’t let friends shift left: Shift smarter with DAST-first AppSec appeared first on Invicti.
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