How Mayhem Is Making AppSec Easy for Small Teams

Cybersecurity risks are on the rise for small and medium-sized businesses, as they are easier targets for attacks, often lacking the resources to both prevent and recover from attacks. 

Finding an effective way to protect applications from malicious actors can be a daunting task. Running tests manually is time-consuming, and small teams may feel that they don’t have the time required to secure their applications. Fortunately, there’s a solution that makes AppSec easier and more accessible for teams of all sizes: Mayhem. 

In this post we'll explore how Mayhem works and the benefits it offers to smaller companies looking to secure their apps. 

What is Mayhem and how does it work?

Mayhem is an ML-driven application security solution that can intelligently navigate through functions, generate test castes, and find and prove defects.

Mayhem combines fuzzing with ML techniques such as symbolic execution, a program analysis technique that determines what inputs cause each part of a program to execute. With the guidelines of symbolic execution, Mayhem is able to produce new test cases that are more likely to uncover defects over time as it works its way deeper into new areas of code. 

Mayhem uses fuzzing along with other techniques to find vulnerabilities in software.

Fuzz testing, or fuzzing, aims to detect known, unknown, and zero-day vulnerabilities. 

Fuzzing is a powerful tool for detecting vulnerabilities in software. It works by purposefully introducing malformed inputs and evaluating the responses it receives to verify that the application works as expected, even in unexpected situations. 

As one of the most effective testing techniques available, fuzzing can detect problems that would go undetected with other forms of security testing, because it continuously tests your running code instead of simply scanning it for defects. 

Fuzzing has become a favored approach in Application Security Testing, and it is no secret that the benefits of fuzzing testing are vast, as it finds unknown vulnerabilities and not only CVEs. Conducting fuzz testing throughout the SDLC (software development lifecycle) has been shown to reduce the costs of production as well as the time to market, since once set up, it can run in the background to discover vulnerabilities and requires little ongoing maintenance.

Fuzzing increases developer productivity because it works differently than other AppSec solutions, producing no false positives that waste development time. Every reported crash is a reproducible vulnerability, allowing development teams to find and fix them quickly.

Fuzz testing has traditionally only been available to companies with large security budgets.

Guided fuzz testing is a popular DAST tool that has traditionally required deep technical expertise to run, meaning its use has been exclusive to technology behemoths with large security budgets, such as Google and Microsoft.

As a result, smaller teams have been left without the benefits of fuzz testing. Thankfully, with Mayhem's automated approach to fuzz testing, even small teams can take advantage of this powerful protection against software vulnerabilities.  

Small teams can benefit from using an Appsec solution like Mayhem.

Fortunately for small teams, Mayhem makes AppSec both cost-effective and accessible. 

Mayhem delivers powerful features like a copy/paste reproduction and backtrace for every defect, self-learning AI using symbolic execution and fuzzing to continually expand code coverage, and automatic creation of regression tests for every defect found to prevent the reintroduction of bugs. 

Mayhem makes it easy for small teams to get started with AppSec.

Mayhem’s combined fuzzing and ML-driven techniques have opened the door for teams of all sizes to find and fix their security weaknesses faster and more easily. So if you're looking for a way to make AppSec easy for your team, give Mayhem a try. You'll be glad you did.

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