Code Review – is automated testing enough?

A New Year reminder that code review and penetration testing each miss vulnerabilities the other finds, so organizations should do both and remediate findings instead of delaying fixes.

Five steps for an effective secure code review program: build security culture with developers, rotate reviewers, standardize processes and tooling, and catch vulnerabilities before deployment.

Four myths hold back application security programs, from 'AppSec teams are optional' to 'DevOps shops do not need one'; successful journeys start with a central governing team and defect discovery.

Open source doesn't mean secure: reviewing one company's untouched framework surfaced nearly 80% of 10,000+ findings, including SQL injection and persistent XSS—vet third-party code accordingly.

After Microsoft open-sourced Word for Windows 1.1a, a CheckMarx scan of the 1980s C++ codebase surfaced strcpy-style unsafe functions and 123 gotos—showing how far secure coding has come.

Outsourcing guides rarely address security: require secure coding training, put security reviews in contracts, and demand a penetration test plus code review with mitigation before release.