Breaches and Security Trends

May 20,2025

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, organizations of every size and industry are grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks-often tailored to their region, vertical, or development pipelines. At a recent Forrester webinar supported by Labrador Labs, security leaders and practitioners came together to explore two intertwined themes: the alarming rise in breaches documented by Forrester, and an open-source approach to application security that promises both depth and speed. Below, we unpack the key takeaways from the webinar “Breaches by the Numbers: Adapting to Regional Challenges Is Imperative,” and dive into how Labrador Labs’ unique three-layer vulnerability analysis can help you stay ahead of today’s adversaries.

The Shifting Breach Landscape: Forrester’s Wake-Up Call

Forrester’s analysis, published April 12, 2022, highlighted a sobering reality: breaches are not only more frequent, but they’re also more targeted and regionally nuanced than ever before. Key observations include:

Regional Variation in Attack Vectors

While North America still sees a high volume of ransomware and phishing activity, organizations in Europe are increasingly targeted via supply-chain compromises, and Asia/Pacific is experiencing a surge in zero-day exploitation tied to localized vulnerability disclosures.

Application Security Gaps

Despite widespread adoption of traditional scanning tools, 70% of breaches involve vulnerabilities in custom web applications or APIs. Legacy security tools frequently miss complex code level flaws or fail to integrate smoothly into modern CI/CD pipelines.

Pressure on Development Teams

Release cycles have accelerated. Today’s dev teams often ship updates weekly or even daily, leaving little room for manual code reviews. Without automated, accurate testing, vulnerable code can and often does reach production.

Taken together, these trends underscore a simple but critical insight: “If you’re not adapting your security strategy to regional and pipeline-specific challenges, you’ll fall behind.”

Why Open-Source Matters and How Labrador Labs Fits In

Traditional commercial scanners certainly have their place, but they often come with steep licensing fees, limited transparency, and a “black-box” approach that hampers customization. Labrador Labs, spun out of Korea University’s Software Security Lab in 2018, offers an open-source alternative designed for modern development ecosystems:

  1. Three-Layer Vulnerability Analysis
    • Layer 1: Static Code Analysis
      • Deep syntactic and semantic analysis uncovers classic code issues: buffer overflows, injection flaws, insecure deserialization.
    • Layer 2: Dependency & License Scanning
      • Beyond just CVE lookups, Labrador Labs’ engine inspects transitive dependencies and license obligations, flagging potential licensing conflicts in addition to security risks.
    • Layer 3: Behavioral & Binary Inspection
      • By instrumenting compiled artifacts, it detects vulnerabilities that only emerge at runtime or through obscure build-time optimizations.
    • This three-pronged approach yields higher accuracy and fewer false positives than many single-layer tools a benefit validated by customers like Korea Telecom, Intuitive, and Samsung.
  2. Automated SBOM Generation
    • The Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is rapidly becoming regulatory standard from the U.S. Executive Order on Cybersecurity to emerging EU directives. Labrador Labs automatically generates SBOMs conformant to SPDX and CycloneDX formats, embedding them directly into your CI/CD pipeline.
  3. Patch Recommendations & Prioritization
    • Discovering a vulnerability is only half the battle. Labrador Labs goes further by correlating CVSS scores with exploit maturity and active threat intelligence feeds, then recommending actionable patches or mitigations, saving security teams countless hours of research.
  4. Seamless DevOps Integration
    • Delivered as a set of CLI tools, RESTful APIs, and GitHub Actions, Labrador Labs slots neatly into existing workflows. Teams can enforce security gates on pull requests, generate SBOMs at build time, and trigger automated tests against container images.

Putting It All Together: A Practical Workflow

To illustrate how these capabilities converge in a real-world scenario, consider a typical microservices-based web application:

  1. Developer Pushes Code
    • A new feature branch is created. A pre-commit hook invokes Labrador Labs’ static analyzer, catching a SQL injection risk before the code even reaches the shared repo.
  2. CI/CD Pipeline Triggers
    • On merge to main, GitHub Actions run the dependency scanner. An out-of-date library with two high-severity CVEs is flagged, and an updated version is suggested.
  3. Docker Image Build
    • During containerization, the behavioral engine inspects the binary and uncovers a misconfigured use of eval(), which could enable remote code execution when combined with a specific payload.
  4. SBOM Publication
    • An SBOM is generated and attached to the build artifact, ensuring downstream teams and auditors can trace every component.
  5. Dashboard & Reporting
    • Vulnerabilities are triaged in Labrador Labs’ web dashboard, sorted by business impact and exploit maturity. Weekly executive reports summarize security posture and remediation status.

This end-to-end flow powered entirely by open-source components dramatically reduces mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to remediation (MTTR), while giving security and dev teams full visibility into every phase of the software lifecycle.

Case Studies: Real-World Impact

Several enterprises have already seen tangible benefits:

  • Korea Telecom
    • By embedding Labrador Labs into its 24-hour release pipeline, KT reduced critical vulnerability leaks by 85% within three months. Automated SBOMs also smoothed compliance with South Korea’s Telecommunications Business Act.
  • Intuitive Surgical
    • Facing stringent medical device regulations, Intuitive leveraged the three-layer analysis to uncover legacy buffer-overflow vulnerabilities in an older C++ module issues that had eluded previous scanning tools.
  • Samsung SDS
    • As one of the world’’’s largest IT service providers, Samsung SDS needed a solution that scaled across thousands of repositories. Labrador Labs’ REST API allowed for automated, fleet-wide scans, uncovering misconfigurations in container manifests and license policy violations.

Beyond the Webinar: Looking Ahead

While the Forrester research paints a clear picture of the challenges regional targeting, evolving breach tactics, and relentless release cadences the conversation doesn’t end at the webinar. As organizations gear up for new regulations (NIST SP 800-161 for supply-chain risk management, the upcoming EU Cyber Resilience Act, and more), the ability to produce accurate SBOMs, analyze code at multiple layers, and integrate seamlessly with DevOps will be non-negotiable.

Open-source tools like Labrador Labs democratize access to enterprise-grade security, enabling organizations of any size to adopt a “shift-left” posture without sacrificing depth or rigor. Whether you’re just starting your security journey or looking to augment an existing program, a three-layer vulnerability analysis coupled with automated SBOM generation is a powerful combination.

Getting Started

If you’re intrigued by what you’ve read, here’s how to take the first step:

  1. Visit the Labrador Labs GitHub
    • Clone the repo, explore the code, and contribute to an open-source community dedicated to raising the bar for application security.
  2. Try the CLI
    • Run labradorlab scan ./your‐project and see immediate insights into your code and dependencies.
  3. Join the Community
    • Participate in discussions on Slack or the mailing list to learn best practices for three-layer analysis, SBOM generation, and pipeline integration.
  4. Schedule a Demo
    • Reach out to contact@labradorlabs.ai to see a live walkthrough tailored to your environment even if you’re already using other security tools, you may be surprised by what you uncover.

By combining Forrester’s data-driven insights with a forward-thinking, open-source security platform, you can turn breach statistics from a source of anxiety into a roadmap for continuous improvement. In an era where a single vulnerability can cost millions, it’s time to adapt, automate, and accelerate your application security journey.