ShiftLeft™ Inc., an innovator in application security, today announced the industry’s first public real-world benchmark of its continuous application security solution. The test measured ShiftLeft’s ability to protect a vulnerable application against exploit attempts made by some of industry’s best white-hat hackers. Cobalt.io, the leader in Pen Testing as a Service, performed the penetration testing to provide ethical hacking expertise and an objective third-party perspective.

Lab-based testing provides standardized results, but it cannot emulate the unpredictability of human-driven real-world hacking scenarios. In a lab, common tools may be used to probe the application for potential weaknesses. In the real world, these tools merely inform the attacker, who then seeks to exploit subtle nuances using more complex attacks. “ShiftLeft’s ability to analyze an application in development, in order to automatically protect it in production, enables the company to benchmark themselves in unique ways,” said Vik Phatak, CEO of NSS Labs. “This aligns well with the fast pace of the modern software development lifecycle.”

The testing methodology started by developing an application that included six (6) of the relevant OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, including:

Next, two instances of the application were created. One instance was hosted without any security protection. Another instance was protected by ShiftLeft, which extracted the application’s security DNA in order to create a custom security profile that protected the application in runtime.

Finally, Cobalt.io performed a 14-day penetration test against both applications. Cobalt.io had 3 white-hat hacking experts attack both applications with any and all tools and methods. Cobalt.io was able to find and exploit all 6 vulnerabilities in the unprotected test application. However, the application protected by ShiftLeft could not be exploited during the test.

“After discovering several vulns in the unprotected application, our experts could no longer exploit in-scope vulns with the ShiftLeft protection in place,” said Brian Levine of Cobalt.io.

“Legacy security products are tested in a legacy fashion: in a test lab, where known tools throw known attack patterns to see if the security products can detect the attacks. This does not represent the real world, where the hackers are not limited to using known tools,” said Manish Gupta, CEO and co-founder of ShiftLeft. “At ShiftLeft, our mission is to protect the application without ever reacting to threats. I am excited to see the positive results of this test, as they demonstrate the power of the ShiftLeft solution.”

About ShiftLeft

ShiftLeft™ Inc., is an innovator in application-specific cloud security, delivering the industry’s first fully automated Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS) solution that understands the unique security needs of each version of each application and creates custom security and threat detection for it. With ShiftLeft, DevOps can make threat detection part of their CI/CD process. ShiftLeft’s approach allows teams to both protect their applications immediately and enhance the security posture of their code. The company was founded by a team with extensive backgrounds in security and cloud infrastructure who were early innovators of technologies such as sandbox, nextgen Firewall, nextgen Electronic Payment network and Fraud Modeling, and several open source initiatives. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., ShiftLeft is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Mayfield. For more information, see https://www.shiftleft.io/.

About Cobalt.io

Cobalt.io’s Pen Testing as a Service (PTaaS) Platform transforms yesterday’s broken pen test model into a data-driven vulnerability management engine. Fueled by a global talent pool of certified freelancers, Cobalt.io’s SaaS pen test platform delivers actionable results that empower agile teams to pinpoint, track, and remediate software vulnerabilities. Hundreds of organizations now benefit from high-quality pen test findings, faster remediation times, and higher ROI for their pen test budget. Visit https://cobalt.io/ to learn how Cobalt.io is securing apps for companies such as Verifone, GoDaddy, MuleSoft and Credit Karma.