The financial services industry has fewer security flaws than most other industries, according to a report from application security testing developer Veracode.
In its report, the firm found that while the sector ranks low in overall security flaw percentages, it has one of the lowest fix rates for software security flaws.
Furthermore, the sector falls to the middle of the pack for high-severity security flaws, with 18% of applications containing a serious vulnerability, suggesting financial firms should prioritise identifying and remediating the flaws that matter most.
These findings come from Veracode’s annual State of Software Security report v12, which analysed 20 million scans across half a million applications in the financial, technology, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and government sectors.
Across the six industries, the financial sector has the second-lowest proportion of applications containing security flaws at 73%. In the previous year’s report, the industry also had the lowest number of software flaws across all sectors but has been overtaken by manufacturing in this year’s study.
Veracode Chief Research Officer Chris Eng said, “One of the advantages of serving the software development community for so many years is that Veracode can see changes in development practices across industries over time. We found that while financial services applications have fewer security flaws than last year, the sector lags behind other industries when it comes to fix rate.
“Our research showed that security training can significantly improve remediation speeds, and that companies whose development teams had completed hands-on training using real-life applications fixed flaws 35 percent faster than those without such training.”
Earlier in the year, Veracode received a ‘significant growth investment’ from private equity firm TA Associates. This deal, which values the company at $2.5bn, made TA Associates the largest shareholder in Veracode.
With the funds, the RegTech company is looking to hire more staff.
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